This week marked the start of our Carmen Opera Taster Workshops to 8 primary and secondary schools in Wandsworth & Merton. The workshops were organised with the help of the lovely teams as Merton Music Foundation and Wandsworth Music and will be delivered over the next 2 weeks by our brilliant team of facilitators – Rachel Maby, Juliane Gallant, Elliott Daley and Elizabeth Humphries.
Claire & Elspeth
Following the success of our concerts in September 2020, our covid-safe Care Home Concerts are returning this May! Thanks to the generosity of Wimbledon Foundation and Merton Giving, we will be performing for residents and staff from the gardens and carparks of care homes across Wandsworth and Merton.
We are thrilled that Soprano Claire Wild and Pianist Elspeth Wilkes will be returning to deliver these concerts with us. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram where we’ll be posting throughout the project.
We are delighted to welcome Rachel Kraftman to our team. Rachel will be organising our concerts for care homes and workshops for schools over the next few months. We asked her a few questions so you could get to know her!
I share Baseless Fabric’s passionate belief that theatre and music have the power to build community and transform society. I am so excited to be focusing specifically on community engagement and providing opera, music and theatre experiences to people who may not have had the opportunity otherwise.
David Horton as Eisenstein & James McOran-Campbell as Falke
Despite the grey January days this particularly bleak January we have something very exciting to look forward to this summer! With the hugest thanks to the Postcode Community Trust, we are thrilled that later this year when the weather warms up, Covid restrictions are lifted a little and hopefully many carehome residents will have received their vaccine, we are able to offer South West London carehomes a FULL PERFORMANCE of our acclaimed re-imagined Die Fledermaus (4 stars – The Guardian)!
As with our recent carehome concerts, these performances will again take place in the carpark or garden of the care homes to keep residents, staff and artists safe in these changing challenging times. And we are thrilled that this time rather than just concerts we can offer a full performance of Die Fledermaus giving residents and staff an opportunity to enjoy the full story of Strauss’ operetta. Read more
We are thrilled to announce that we are re-imagining another classic opera for London life today in our unique street opera style! This time we are taking on one of the big tragic operas with perhaps the most widely recognised operatic music – Carmen by Georges Bizet!
We are so excited to take on this challenge and hugely grateful to our funders: Arts Council, Wimbledon Foundation, Samuel Gardner Memorial Trust, Humphrey Richardson Taylor Charitable Trust, Merton Council, Wandsworth Council and Three Monkies Trust. Thanks to their support we’ll be working on the creative adaptation and offering projects for local young people in 2021. We will also be fundraising further to make the final performances and further activity for young people and the elderly happen in 2022. As ever, if you feel able to support our work we’d be incredibly grateful. Read more
During late September/early October 2020 we headed to seven different care homes across Wandsworth and Merton to provide a concert to their residents and staff to try and bring some musical joy and lift spirits during these difficult times of Covid 19. Kindly funded by Wimbledon Foundation, Merton Giving and Sylvia Waddilove Foundation we performed outside in the car parks and gardens of care homes so that residents and staff could safely enjoy our socially distanced performance. Check out our video for a peek at what we got up to! Read more
This week we are kicking off our opera care homes project! Soprano Claire Wild and Pianist Elspeth Wilkes with a small team are visiting a number of different care homes in Merton & Wandsworth. We’re going to be Covid-19 safe with our team working in car parks and gardens at the care homes and have handgel, masks and thermometers at the ready!
Claire Wild attended the Royal Northern College of Music‚ sponsored by the Peter Moores Foundation and the Musicians Benevolent Fund. She won the Webster Booth Award‚ the James Oncken Song Prize and the Frost Brownson Award.
Highlights in recent seasons include Lilli Vanessi / Katharine in Kiss Me, Kate and Elle La voix humaine for Welsh National Opera, Susanna Le nozze di Figaro for Regents Opera and Petra in A Little Night Music for Opera Project at West Green House, Welsh National Opera as Emma in Khovanshchina and Garsington Opera as Caridad The Skating Rink, a newly commissioned opera by David Sawer.
Concert repertoire includes Elijah, Messiah‚ Carmina Burana, Bach St Matthew Passion, Mozart C Minor Mass. She has performed Dallapicolla Commiato and Stravinsky Pulcinella (Royal Northern Sinfonia) and Christmas and New Year Galas (Raymond Gubbay, Orchestra of Opera North, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and London Concert Orchestra) and Messiah (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra). Read more
Thanks to the generosity of Merton Giving and Wimbledon Foundation we are thrilled to be offering Merton & Wandsworth care homes an opera performance session in their garden or car park this autumn. Based on the successful format we have previously provided to older people’s lunch clubs at community organisations including Age UK, Commonside Trust and Wimbledon Guild we wanted to offer a musical session to help improve older people’s mental well-being during this difficult time. A professional opera singer and pianist will perform several songs and talk about their freelance careers and the work of Baseless Fabric in the garden or car park socially distanced from residents and staff.
If you know a local care home that would be interested and whose restrictions will allow for outdoor visitors this Sept please get in touch!
Meanwhile, we are also intending to offer care homes a full performance of our acclaimed modern English Die Fledermaus next year so that residents and staff can experience the joy of a full operatic story (and a very funny one with hilarious characters and super catchy tunes)! We currently have a fundraising target of £9k to give 6 care homes this opportunity (as well as providing work for 12 freelance professional artists who have all seen their income disappear during this crisis). We have various funding applications into trusts and foundations but if you are able to donate towards this joyful experience for local elderly please donate here!
Click to Support this Care Home Project!
Last summer we worked with the brilliant designer Marina Hadjilouca on Die Fledermaus. We caught up with her to see what she’s been up to since…
Abelard and Heloise
Photo: Christos Avramides
I designed the sets and costumes for ‘Abelard and Heloise’. The play premiered in Cyprus on the 14th of February 2020. It a contemporary play,
Abelard and Heloise
Photo: Christos Avramides
One of the first things I do when I’m brought onto a new production, after I have read the text (or in this case, the score and libretto, and listened to the opera) I have a conversation with the director. We talk about the story and their vision, and I share my first responses with some general inspiration images. We look at things that may have triggered my imagination.
We’re 5 years old! On 22nd December 2014 we nervously registered Baseless Fabric as an official company and set up a meeting with a business bank account manager. It was all a bit scarily official. So how do we do this then?! Run a company, make work in public spaces, engage with our local community…
It’s been a quite mental 5 years and we have learned such a lot both creatively and practically in working out how to make it all happen. We couldn’t have done it without your support.
A First Class Death (2015)
A First Class Death at VAULT Festival, A Secret Life with Theatre 503, Reunion & Dark Pony in South London libraries, street operas Drifting Dragons, Cosi Fan Tutte and Die Fledermaus, Mitcham Library drama workshops, countless Opera Taster Workshops for local schools & sessions with elderly groups, and recently also 2 parallel productions for schools offering young people a chance to engage, explore and be imaginative with opera over a 7 month project. Not to mention becoming a charity 4 years ago! Read more
