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

Wirb ebenfalls für deine Seite

20th November 2009

Post

The Argyle’s alive with the Sound of Music…

We had the children rehearsing in the space on Wednesday, singing AND moving at the same time. Any opera singer will testify as to the difficulty of doing those things together!

Anyway, what they’ve ended up doing is nice and simple. Jon Laird (Chorus Master) has trained them to make a very confident sound. The fact that a bunch of local kids are singing in the scene gives it a very authentic and honest feel. But then, it’s a sweet bunch of local kids playing a sweet bunch of local kids. Ironic, don’t you think!