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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16th November 2009

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The space, the final frontier

The space in which we’re performing is big. BBBBIIIIGGGGG! But it’s going to be interesting to see how big it feels with 450 audience, 120 chorus, an orchestra above head height, 60 actors and 60 dancers. We’ll have to fit the opera singers in there too, at some point…!

We had a quick, experimental rehearsal down in the space today. It was a bit of a test to see how things will work in the round (with audience on all sides of the performers) and in that big, echoey space. It’s amazing! There’s a lot of work being done by Graham (the director) to make sure the words can be heard if the singer is singing away from you.

Ron (singing Othello) and Keel (Iago) are singing brilliantly down there, and their acting is filling the entire space - amazing to watch!

We’ve been talking about electrifying moments in music, and we’re expecting many of such moments… Watch this space!