New Opera and Participation
Research Seminar Programme, Spring Term 2011
Wednesdays 4pm-6pm
The David Osmond-Smith Recital Room, Falmer House 120.
In 2011 Glyndebourne's Education Department will be 25 years-old. To mark this anniversary, the Head of Education, Katie Tearle, who founded the department, will spend one day a week as a Research Fellow with the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre. As part of the Fellowship, Katie has organized a special seminar series on New Opera and Participation.
Glyndebourne has a strong history of commissioning new work; the majority of Glyndebourne's commissioning since 1990 has been led by the Education Department, with main stage work for young performers and audiences being part of Glyndebourne's artistic policy. Glyndebourne has commissioned large-scale operas for the community and young people to participate in and build wider audiences for opera. The first community opera involved over 300 people on Hastings Pier (1990) and was composed by Jonathan Dove, who went on to write 2 more community operas for Ashford (1993) and Peterborough (1995). The youth operas Misper (1997/98) and Zoë (2000) (John Lunn/Stephen Plaice) and the Hip Hop version of Così fan tutte - School 4 Lovers brought the community to Glyndebourne with the operas presented on the main stage.
The latest youth opera, Knight Crew by composer Julian Philips, a doctoral student in the Music Department at Sussex, was performed in March 2010 at Glyndebourne. The opera was based on a novel by Nicky Singer, updating the King Arthur myth. This high profile project involved around 700 people in development, participation and work-related learning projects. As well as four performances of the opera, including one performance for schools and colleges, the work was featured in a BBC 2 series Gareth Malone Goes to Glyndebourne that reached 2 million viewers.
SEMINAR PROGRAMME
Wednesday 19 January
Graham Vick, Artistic Director of Birmingham Opera Company
Graham Vick CBE is one of the foremost opera directors of our times. His productions have been seen at La Scala, Milan; Metropolitan Opera, New York; Mariinsky Opera, St Petersburg; Maggio Musicale, Florence and many more. His production of Verdi's Falstaff opened the newly re-furbished Royal Opera House and between 1992 and 2000 he was Director of Productions at Glyndebourne Opera. He has won many international awards including the Premio Abbiati in Italy (3 times) and The South Bank Show Award (twice). He is a Chevalier de L'Ordes des Arts et des Lettres, Honorary Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham and was Visiting Professor of Opera Studies at Oxford University. He was awarded the CBE for services to Opera in the Queen's Birthday Honours List in June 2009.
Throughout his career Graham has created projects designed to reach new audiences. At Scottish Opera in the late 1970s he founded a small touring company with funds from a government job creation scheme to take opera to remote communities in the Highlands and Islands. In the 1980s he worked with a group of 300 unemployed young people to bring to life Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story in an abandoned mill in Yorkshire and in 1987 founded Birmingham Opera Company. Graham views his work in Birmingham as entirely complementary to his international directing career and is adamant that excellence and accessibility are not at odds. Although a small operation, Birmingham Opera Company is now seen to be at the forefront of the modernisation of opera, and a pioneer in its development as a 21st-century artform.
Wednesday 2 February
Katie Tearle, Head of Glyndebourne Education
'History of Opera and Participation and the Glyndebourne Experience'
Benjamin Britten, and the work which is arguably the first community opera Noyes Fludde - The Chester Miracle Play set to music - written in 1958 for the Aldeburgh Festival and premiered in Orford Church, have dominated the world of Opera and Participation over the last 50 years. This seminar will explore Britten's pioneering work to set the stage for an overview of Glyndebourne's youth and community commissions up to the latest work Knight Crew.
Wednesday 2 March
Julian Philips and Dr Richard Ings
'Knight Crew : the process and evaluation'
'My contention is that this project exemplified a growing understanding that education work - which comes with a plethora of labels, from participatory to inclusion to community to outreach work - is no longer an add-on to artistic development but intrinsic to it. The Cinderella has come to the Ball.' Richard Ings, Knight Crew Evaluation.
The framework for the Knight Crew evaluation was to explore the paradox of maintaining Glyndebourne's high professional standards whilst widening access by engaging non-professionals in our work. In this session Julian Philips and Richard Ings will discuss these issues.
Julian Philips was appointed Glyndebourne's first Composer in Residence in October 2006 as part of a Collaborative Doctoral programme with the University of Sussex funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Alan and Karen Grieve Charitable Trust. The residency enabled Julian to investigate different approaches to the creation of new opera and music theatre as an aspect of the broader artistic, educational and audience development activities of Glyndebourne Festival Opera as part of his research. His career to date in theatre, ballet and opera includes composing scores for 10 theatre productions with the director Michael Grandage, chamber operas for the WNO Max Department and a commission for a full-length ballet. He is currently Head of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
"Three years ago, I embarked on a creative residency at Glyndebourne, which allowed me to shadow a broad range of the company's work and develop a number of projects of my own. Through Glyndebourne I could focus and develop my skills in a thriving operatic environment while also having the space to try things out, improvise, take risks. Through Sussex University's music department and specifically the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre, I could equip myself with a more rigorous critical framework for my creative ambitions, balancing pragmatic compositional solutions with freer, more experimental thinking. I would allow me to invest in the next stage of my professional development and harness my garnered experience with fresh creative ideas and the diverse contexts in which to realise them." Julian Philips.
Dr Richard Ings. Richard Ings has worked in the cultural sector as a funder, evaluator, researcher, writer, editor, teacher and consultant for over 25 years. He has been freelance since 1991, working for a wide range of clients, including the national and regional offices of Arts Council England, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, The National Youth Agency, CapeUK, Youth Clubs UK, Artswork, the Isle of Wight Children's Fund, Lewisham Education Arts Network, NESTA, Creative Partnerships London North and, in recent years, a growing number of producing arts companies. Having run seminars and lectured on both the arts and American visual culture in a number of universities, most recently in the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham, Richard is currently an associate lecturer at the University of the Arts.
The common threads in much of this work are Richard's interest in participatory practice in the arts, his involvement in evaluating, promoting and disseminating good practice and his belief that everyone - and especially young people at risk - should have access to the risks and pleasures of high quality creative activity.
Wednesday 9 March, 2012
Stephen Plaice, playwright and librettist.
'On devising and writing libretti for participatory opera'
Stephen has recently collaborated with Harrison Birtwistle on Angelfighter, an oratorio for this year's Bach Festival in Leipzig. He wrote the libretto for Birtwistle's chamber opera The Io Passion in 2004. A new chamber opera with Birtwistle, based on the original Faust Chapbook, working title Certain Circles, began its development at Dartington this summer. Stephen has written the libretto for Ludd and Isis, the community opera which will open the new ROH Production Park in Thurrock in December 2010. Paint Me, a chamber opera with the Portuguese composer Luis Tinoco, will be produced at Culturgest in Lisbon in late 2010. Stephen's children's opera Confucius Says, created with the composer Richard Taylor, received a Royal Philharmonic Award in 2008. In 2007 Stephen wrote the libretto for Orlando Gough's community opera The Finnish Prisoner, a co-production between The Paddock and Finnish National Opera, directed by Susannah Waters. With the composer John Lunn, Stephen has written three youth operas for Glyndebourne, Misper (1997), Zoë (2000) ,Tangier Tattoo (2005) and also, with Jonathan Gill and Charlie Parker, School4Lovers (2006), a hip hop reworking of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte.