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Carmen Concerts!

Following on from the success of both our full re-imagined Carmen production this summer and also our successful concerts for carehomes and local elderly organisations over the last couple of years, we’ve had a brilliant week visiting Merton & Wandsworth organisations for a concert as part of our Carmen 2022 programme of activities.

It’s been such fun visiting both carehomes that we’ve developed a relationship with over Covid & also going back to organisations such as Wimbledon Guild and Katherine Low Settlement that we’ve not been to since pre-Covid. And we’ve made friends with a couple of new places to – Hestia in Tooting and Sparkle in Putney. It’s been lovely time seeing old friends including the amazing 102 year old Sheila and meeting new people like Peter with his encyclopaedic knowledge of music. We even had some nursery children join in with their grandfriends at Sparkle who run intergenerational activities.

We were also delighted to welcome 2 new practitioners to this area of our work – the lovely baritone Philip Smith (Don Alfonso in our Cosi Fan Tutte & Escamillo in our Carmen R&D) and brilliant pianist Yllka Istrefi. They delighted the audiences with a variety of pieces from opera, musical theatre, classical songs, piano solos and of course a bit of Baseless Fabric’s re-imagined Carmen!

We had a fantastic time performing these concerts and to hear so many people joining in with singing and clapping along to ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ and ‘On The Street Where You Live’. We even had the Sparkle nursery children marching to Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Vagabond’ and pretending to be fish for Schubert’s ‘Die Forelle’! Big smiles all round!

 

             

 

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Big thanks to everyone involved in Drifting Dragons

Patisserie Valerie, Wimbledon Piazza

Patisserie Valerie, Wimbledon Piazza

We had such an amazing time running our Merton Opera project Drifting Dragons this summer – we hope you managed to catch one of the performances on your high street or perhaps participated in one of our workshops at schools and young people’s groups in the area.

It was fantastic seeing the surprised faces in Morrisons and M&S as customers realised that other customers were opera singing their conversation! And we were delighted by the positive audience responses – everybody seemed surprised and pleased we’d gatecrashed their lives for 10mins in a public space as they went about their daily life, shopping, waiting for a bus or drinking coffee.

Jigsaw4u

Jigsaw4u

The biggest thanks to all of the local businesses across the borough of Merton that supported the project and allowed us to perform in their stores – Wyevale Garden Centre, The Gorringe Park Pub, Tesco Tooting, M&S and the Qube Centre, Café La Lavella and Morden Library, the New Horizon Centre and Pollards Hill Library, Starbucks & Waitrose Raynes Park, Tag Elezz Café and Morrisons Mitcham, Patisserie Valerie and Morrisons Wimbledon, Saucer & Cup and the Co-Op Wimbledon Park, Maison St Cassien and Bayley & Sage! And also thanks for those involved in our performances as part of the Arcola Theatre’s Grimeborn Festival – Café Route, Dalston Junction station manager, Dalston Square, Hackney Council and of course the Arcola itself. We had so much enthusiasm and support so thank you all! 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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Sneak peek of ‘Drifting Dragons’

If you weren’t lucky enough to make it along to our public sharing at the end of our Arts Council funded R&D of ‘Drifting Dragons’, you can get an idea of what we’re up to in this video. Thanks to Oskar McCarthy, Ayaka Tanimoto, Rosemary Hinton & Greg Harradine.

We’re now onto the next stage of the project planning for the full production in the summer. So if you like what you see stay tuned!