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Composing Drifting Dragons

Drifting Dragons outside M&S. Photo: Oliver.john Works

Drifting Dragons outside M&S. Photo: Oliver.john Works

It was a daunting prospect. Write an opera? I had written a considerable amount of instrumental music and songs for theatre before but never an opera. This would be something new.

Those who have been following the Drifting Dragons journey will know that it began life around a year ago. Joanna Turner, Artistic Director of Baseless Fabric, wanted to create a promenade opera about the lives of Londoners. She was looking for a composer and I nervously but eagerly raised my hand across cyberspace. Before long we had agreed to work together and were interviewing local people in Merton (Baseless Fabric’s home borough) about their views on opera, as well as finding out about their lives and memories, which would ultimately feed into the story of Drifting Dragons. The theme for the opera soon established itself as friendship and how over time it can be rocked by setbacks and challenges. I set to work writing the libretto and music for a short work-in-progress performance at the Wimbledon Theatre at the end of January 2016. Read more

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Interviews with the cast of Drifting Dragons

We had a chat with our cast of Drifting Dragons about what they really put in their supermarket shopping basket. Check us out in your local Morrisons this week!

Greg Harradine

Greg Harradine

Name: Greg Harradine

What do you play and where did you train? “Piano and Guitar and I trained at Kingston University and did a degree in Music Technology then a Masters for Composing for Film and TV.”

What made you decide to be a composer? “Music has always been the thing I love doing, not wanting to practise an instrument for hours, composing seemed to be the thing to do!

What do you do in your spare time? “I enjoy cycling and running, reading, but also hanging out with my friends”

If we bumped into you in the supermarket, what would you have in your shopping basket? “Tough one, I’d have lots of fruit and veg, bit of salmon maybe, some chicken and also some eggs, I’m a simple guy!” Read more

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Workshops for the new Merton Opera

Workshop at St Marks Academy

Workshop at St Marks Academy

We’re well underway with our planning for the full production of Drifting Dragons, our new promenade street opera kindly supported by the Arts Council, The Philip Bates Trust and The Humphrey Richardson Taylor Charitable Trust. We’ve been back into community organisations including the wonderful Merton & Morden Guild and New Horizon Centre to talk to people about the project, show them the filming from the R&D and get their thoughts on both what should happen next in the story and where we should perform on the high streets of Merton.

Students workshop at St Marks Academy

Workshop at St Marks Academy

Meanwhile, we’ve also run workshops for some brilliant young people teaching them to sing and act out some of our opera themselves. We taught them to sing some of our music, discussed the difference between an aria and a duet, and how to play a character while singing and playing a scene. We’ve seen some brilliant characters and heard some fantastic singing at Lonesome Primary, The Priory Church of England Primary and St Marks Academy, so we’re hoping the students will come along to the performances and give our professional opera singers some tips on how it’s done ☺

And I’m currently running round talking to supermarkets and cafes and getting everything organised for our high street performance locations so expect to see us on your high street very soon!

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Drifting Dragons Cast Announced

We are excited to announce the cast for our upcoming production of ‘Drifting Dragons’. This production is a new street opera coming to the streets of Merton and we’re also taking it to the Arcola Theatre’s Grimeborn Opera Festival

 

Felicity-Buckland-headshotFelicity Buckland
Sadie

Felicity trained at the RNCM where she received the Eunice Pettigrew Prize and graduated with 1st Class Honours, and later on ENO’s Opera Works programme. She currently studies privately with Mary Plazas.

Her operatic appearances include Cherubino The Marriage of Figaro (Opera Up Close); Cupid Orpheus in the Underworld and Ida/cover Orlovsky Die Fledermaus (Opera Danube); Cunaide Iernin (Surrey Opera); Una, Kiss Me, Figaro! (Merry Opera) and Mercedes Carmen (Co-Opera Co). She has also spent seasons in the chorus at Opera Holland Park, Grange Park Opera where she covered Annina in La Traviata, and as a chorus mentor for Birmingham Opera.

Read more

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Rehearsing for promenade digital theatre

Rehearsing ‘A Secret Life’ has been quite different to other processes I have previously been involved in. Due to the very specific nature of the piece, the delivery of the audio via the smartphone app, as well as the outdoor setting, Joanna and the creative team had to devise a rehearsal plan uniquely tailored to the needs of the project.

First came the unconventional order in which things had to be done. The play’s different elements (text, physical journey, digital) had to be rehearsed first apart and then together, focusing on each one separately and then looking at how they all combine to tell a story. At times there was a feeling we were doing things back to front, especially from the actors’ perspective, but in the same way that deciding on the route the play would follow had to precede the final script, so the recording, editing and treating of the audio content had to come before the rehearsal of exact physical action, and the all-important (and for this project ongoing) ‘technical rehearsals’ had to happen alongside the sessions working on characters’ relationships, events and intentions. This way of working meant the actors had to dive in head first and make choices that in a traditional rehearsal context they might not have been required to make until a few weeks in, as well as demanding exactitude and precision, challenges that our cast rose to with good humour and determination. Read more

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‘A Secret Life’ team on Wandsworth Radio

Last Saturday the Baseless Fabric team headed to Wandsworth Radio to talk about ‘A Secret Life’ for Theatre 503 for the Wandsworth Arts Fringe. You can listen to the recording above to find out more about the show and how the app came about!

 

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On Writing ‘A Secret Life’

Before I met Jo, the artistic director of Baseless Fabric, last year to talk about the possibility of collaborating on a new promenade play, I couldn’t have imagined that six months later, we would have produced a script with verbatim stories from South Londoners as old as 92, which gets delivered to the audience via a smartphone app.

As a playwright, I’ve so far written what you may imagine when you hear the word ‘play’: people sitting in seats, watching actors on a stage. I’ve been to immersive theatre and promenade theatre before, but writing the script for A Secret Life is the first time that I’ve helped create a play that moves — the actors go on a journey out in the world, and you follow them. Read more

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The making of a mobile app for theatre

When we first looked at this project we wanted to see how the mobile phone could enhance the audience’s experience of a production – giving the extra dimension of being able to hear what the characters were thinking as well as their spoken dialogue.

App Wireframe Flow

Wireframe of App User Flow

One of the aims of this project has been to connect young people with the inner lives and memories of the elderly that they might not ordinarily imagine. As we have been interviewing elderly people for their stories for the script, we wanted to present these stories in a way that might engage with a young audience. So using an app on a smartphone felt like a good fit for this project.

In terms of creating the app, we initially engaged with students at Wimbledon College Art (part of the University of the Arts London). The aim was to create an app that the students would naturally use and have input into the design of the app based on their own experiences. Through discussions we worked with them to come up with a user flow for the app. The user flow allows us to see how the user or audience member will interact with the app – what button will progress them to the next screen or take them back to another. This can then inform us when we create the wireframes for the actual screens.

Screen Wireframe Read more

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Cast announced for ‘A Secret Life’

We are delighted to announce the cast for our upcoming production of ‘A Secret Life‘ at Theatre 503, 10th – 15th May 2016.

Phoebe McIntosh

Phoebe McIntosh

Phoebe McIntosh

Phoebe McIntosh is a London-based actress. Since graduating from the MA Acting course at London’s Arts Educational, Phoebe has gained many diverse and exciting credits.
Her first short, Still Born, was nominated for Best Film at the Black Filmmakers International Festival 2009 when it was screened at the BFI. She has gone on to star in the debut music video for acclaimed artist Emeli Sandé’s single, Heaven, directed by Jake Nava (Beyoncé -Single Ladies) as well as a slate of varied and well-received short films ranging from sci-fi to comedy.
In 2012, she worked under Creative Director, Danny Boyle, as a member of the ensemble cast of the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony, where she performed in front of a live audience of 80,000.
This year sees the release of her debut feature film, The Long Road, in which she plays lead female love interest, Rosie.
Phoebe is also a writer and in 2013 she penned, produced and performed in a sell-out run of her first play, The Tea Diaries, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival before it made its London fringe debut at The Tea House Theatre, Vauxhall.
As a voiceover artist she narrates audiobooks, corporate films and video games.
Phoebe is represented by Michael Keane at Elaine Murphy Associates. Read more

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“I was a bit of a loose cannon. I was expelled for not turning up…”

We’ve had a busy few months with our outreach for A Secret Life. We’ve been meeting many wonderful local people and hearing all about their teenage years – and I’ve been popping into Wimbledon Guild so frequently recently I feel like I’m almost part of the team there now! We’ve heard about people’s very different school experiences and yet how career options for women in particular were so very limited for so many years (mostly nursing or secretarial or working in a shop). We’ve interviewed people aged 65 years to 92 years old (the wonderful Derek) at both community centres and individually. The ladies at Merton & Morden Guild kept us laughing with their hilarious first date stories, while at the Katherine Low Settlement we heard what it was like growing up gay when being gay was still illegal…

Meanwhile, it’s also been great fun engaging young people with the audio recordings of elderly people’s memories and how it compares to their own experiences. I think some of the Year 10s at St Marks Academy, Mitcham were surprised to hear Jim (age 82) started smoking when he was 12 and gave up when he was 14, while Jane’s story of not wanting to go to a party because she couldn’t afford the ‘right’ thing to wear resonated with some of the girls. We talked about their stresses about exams and career choices and the pressure on image today, especially with the positives and negatives of social media.

If you’re coming along to see A Secret Life (and you should because it’s going to be great!) you’ll get to hear the words of some of the real people we’ve spoken to as part of the script that Tamara Micner is currently beavering away at putting together. You can book tickets here.

For now, we’ll leave you with a few of the things we’ve heard:

“I had several boyfriends but this time they all came to the door together at half past seven. All to pick me up. My mother was fuming…I was a proper flirt. I just knew when to stop.”

“I wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema, my mum and dad didn’t approve of going to the cinema til I was probably 13 or 14 probably, and that’s when I can remember Elvis Presley films coming out, and being an Elvis Presley fan and wanting to see all his films so that’s when we had to take our little white socks off and get in the queue and hope we’d get in even though we were under 15.”

“I was a bit of a loose cannon. I was expelled for not turning up…I did frustrate them, I know I did. I just went and did things that drove them crazy.”

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