Opera | Project Types

Fleet Footing is now live! Go download the album and map, get your headphones and walking boots on, and go find that river..

I’m so excited about this new project with composer Catherine Kontz. It’s been brewing for a few years, and we are extra-pleased to be funded by the PRSF Women Make Music award, Hinrichsen Foundation, and supported by Tête à Tête – launching as part of their Opera Festival 2018.

The project is an audio dream guiding you along the lost River Fleet, from its source on Hampstead Heath to where it meets the Thames at Blackfriars. There’s text (both spoken and sung), binaural recording, found sound and music, as well as small performative actions that the listener can choose to take part in whilst they walk the route.

Print artist Rowanne Anderson (Rowan Tree Print) has made us a beautiful map to help people find their way and show them where the listening points are.

A multi-sensory opera for people who can hear and people who can’t.

Annie is an astronomer. She knows all about time and space, but she isn’t so sure about life and death. And she’s just gone deaf.
Inspired by the life of astronomer Annie Jump-Cannon, I worked with composer Stephen Bentley-Klein to create a new kind of opera that finds new ways of communicating and engaging with sound and music. The opera had it’s first outing at Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2012, and a further iteration was performed at the Greenbelt Festival 2014.

We worked with D/deaf and hearing practitioners to ingrate BSL, captioning, sensory installations, missing live sound through water and other techniques to speak to hearing audiences about the experience of deafness, and to interpret sound into other sensory experiences for D/deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences.

More information about the piece can be found HERE.