A blog for Birmingham Opera's production of Othello in December 2009. Birmingham Opera Company is not what you expect from opera! Born of a passion and a belief that opera can speak directly to all kinds of people, Artistic Director, Graham Vick, set out to create a company that the people of Birmingham - a city of many peoples - could be proud of. This means creating and staging opera in unpredictable and unusal places close to the streets of the city. It means opening the doors and inviting people in to watch you work and to work with you. This means sharing great art with great people. It's a different way of making opera. We don't have an opera house and we don't work in conventional theatres. We conjure our theatres out of spaces used for other purposes or maybe just abandoned. A brief period of illumination and then we move on - not tied to bricks and mortar... ...nor tied to having a big organisation. By having only 3 people working full-time from a single office in the Jewellery Quarter we can reinvent the company for each project. This way the company exists to make the art and not the other way round. Birmingham Opera Company

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6th November 2009

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Hello Birmingham and the rest of the world (wide web),

First let me briefly introduce myself: My name is Luise, I am from Leipzig, Germany, and I’m currently living in Birmingham. British people often ask me why, with all the beautiful cities in England, I chose Birmingham to do my internship? To be honest I don’t know. Maybe some sixth sense as I am enjoying myself, have no regrets, and think that the city is certainly much better than its reputation. I think that there are many new things to discover in the city and I’m sure there will be a lot of cultural and artistic events to come.

In my mind, one of the best of these is the Birmingham Opera Company, where I’ve been working for two weeks now. I’ve never seen Opera pieces that take place at such special venues, like in an old factory, and involve nearly 300 singers, actors and dancers, most of them volunteers and amateurs. That was one of the reasons why I was so interested in working with these people. Lucky me! I am now supporting as best I can (I’m still trying to break down my language barrier) the team in the office for the preparation of Verdi’s Othello taking place in December at Argyle Warehouse in Digbeth.

The first big rehearsal with all the participants was one week ago and I think everybody was both excited and a little bit nervous.

There were loads of people registering for our production with lots of new faces and some old stagers adding some experience too. During this big meeting Graham Vick introduced us all to the piece, Stephanie and Ronald (playing Desdemona and Othello) gave us a taste of how dramatic the production will be and whist all the participants got started for the show, Flik, Emily, Pete (the famous Box Office Team) and I were doing up the flats for the soloists. I’m sorry that there will be no pictures or films for this important event, but I promise to post some interesting material in the future.

After a quite busy week in the office preparing the programme, contracts for the children chorus, and struggling with mass mailing (I haven’t got a clue what html is), I made it to the actors rehearsal on Sunday. I think there were a few sore heads from a Halloween evening out the night before so luckily Ron (Choreographer) and Richard (Associate Director) started off with a warm up designed to help the actors gain each others trust and lose their inhibitions as you can see here: