FACILITATION
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During their Handelfest tour, ETO hosted a series of workshops for Key Stage 3 students, where participants came together and created an opera in 2 days. Alongside composer Helen Woods, we introduced participants in London, Bournemouth and Saffron Walden to opera, with the intention of broadening their creative aspirations. Participants were joined by one professional singer and instrumentalist.
Workshops such as the Handel Project offer young people an invaluable experience, not only within their introduction to opera, but also within their social and educational development.
I am part of the Create and Sing team at the Royal Opera House, devising resources and training teachers to use music and drama in their classrooms as part of epic opera projects! Take a look at our website here. Alongside running CPD days, I’ve written English translations for opera excerpts, devised rhyming synopses of famous operas and been a presenter in live and pre-recorded videos as part of this work.
I also work regularly with the Youth Opera Company, devising new work with the participants and directing them in excerpts from existing operas. Before COVID struck, I was part of team delivering recruitment workshops around the Midlands for a future Youth Opera Company based there – we really hope that can still happen.
You can glimpse me in action below:
I have been part of the team delivering the ENO Breathe programme. ENO Breathe is an award-winning breathing and wellbeing programme developed specifically for people recovering from COVID-19, who are still suffering from breathlessness and associated anxiety. Delivered by ENO in collaboration with Imperial College Healthcare teams entirely online, the programme focuses on breathing re-training through singing. Read more here.
I am an Associate Artist with Streetwise Opera, an opera company that enables people who’ve experienced homelessness to find inspiration and empowerment while they rebuild their lives and identities. As an Associate Artist, I will lead the delivery of Artist Insight Days, launching in 2023 in London, Nottingham and Manchester. The Insight Days will invite a range of freelance artists and practitioners to learn more about our process of co-creating art with people at risk.
Alongside this, throughout the year, the Associate Artists will be part of Streetwise Opera Ideas Rooms. These sessions are an opportunity to explore and enrich new ideas and themes for upcoming work. Read more here.
I have worked as a facilitator, presenter and educator with Opera North on a number of projects, most recently, an exciting environmental themed singing project based on an arrangement of The Water Diviner’s Tale by composer Rachel Portman. Read more about Opera North's participation programmes here.
I have worked with WNO since 2012, when I was part of the cast for Nine Stories High, a brilliant project that unfolded over 9 months in Wrexham, with different teams of writers and composers working with local groups to write an epic soap opera that we performed in public spaces – including a supermarket, a bowling alley and a train station! You can watch my character, the monstrous Iolo Price, in action here. That was the start of a three-years-and-beyond association with Wrexham on a series of brilliant WNO projects, from an interactive, immersive techno-thriller in collaboration with yellobrick to a wonderful year in residence at Wrexham Maelor Hospital with the ‘Singing Doctors’ initiative – check that out here.
Some of my favourite projects in my whole career have been within the Engage programme that WNO ran in collaboration with the Mayflower Theatre in Southampton. A team of myself as director and writer, Helen Woods as composer, Louise Carey as designer and soprano Zoe Milton-Brown as vocal coach and co-performer. Working with teenagers, usually in a half-term or Easter school holidays, we would use a mainstage WNO opera to inspire an original piece of opera, created in collaboration with the participants, who would perform the fully-staged work at the end of our time with them. Perhaps the greatest one of all was We who are alive and remain, a deeply moving exploration of war and its consequences, inspired by In Parenthesis, a new operatic adaptation of David Jones’s extraordinary poetic novel – photos from this project are shown around this page.
BOLTON SCHOOL CHAMBER CHOIR /
Bolton School
I am the Musical Director of the Bolton School Chamber Choir
