Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.
Within our project we build a sense of community, relationships, security, a place to be you. Some of our members have been with us since the beginning of the Red Hat Opera workshops, but we do get new members discovering us and joining our all inclusive team of creators.
As a demonstration of the variety of people we get attending our workshops, we will be publishing a few posts to showcase their work and talk about what Red Hat Opera has done for them.
How long have you been attending these workshops?
Before it started! 2017/2018? Guy organised a symposium at Trinity Laban. I saw it on Eventbrite: Devise a Political Opera, and I thought, ‘This looks intriguing’, so I went along. A few months later he set it up here [at Theatre Deli].
What intrigued you to come initially?
There are a few things about this one that appealed to me. One was just the notion of political opera. I thought, ‘What is that?’, because it clearly had a real-world intent behind it. But also, I was in the relatively early stages of creating sound art works, so this was to me something that I could potentially do to help develop my voice and performance in such a way that I wouldn’t get anywhere else. The fact that it is free is a very big incentive to come and then keep coming.
So what does keep you coming back?
The fact that it was free but also well done and thought through. There was a lot of energy put into it, a desire to teach, to move people beyond where they came from to somewhere else. There was something to admire. I kept coming back because I wanted to support Guy, the person who was running it. He had put so much effort into this task, for no visible reward and it was something I felt really needed standing behind and supporting.
You said you were a sound artist. How has this specifically helped and been involved in your work?
There is a focus on narrative. All the songs that we’ve done, individually at least, have had a narrative element to them. That has been really helpful in the sense that I’ve realised I can do that quite easily. Before this, if I wrote songs, they’d be fragments of poems, but aligning that with a story takes it into a slightly different domain. I’m now creating mini narratives, mini dramas, mini plays, within one song, so that has fed into what I do quite directly. There’s confidence and skills and actual improvement.
Do you have any highlights of this project?
Developing the song that I wrote was an interesting process. Guy gave us a theme: the personification of time. We were given 10 minutes to write something and then told to get up and sing it. And I got more time to develop it because we didn’t actually do a performance. That’s the longest stretch I’ve had to work on a single song. I’m still working on it to be honest, but it’s taught me a lot because initially I couldn’t sing it. What I wanted, I couldn’t quite sing, so in working on it, in singing it in a way that includes changes in key etc, I’ve made it a lot more sophisticated than it ever was. I’m not musically trained in any shape whatsoever. Everything I do, I just think about and work it out, so this has been a really interesting process of developing something through singing it and through trial and error. It has helped to develop my voice, to enable me to do things that I couldn’t do before. But also, structurally, tonally and emotionally – how a song works.
Red Hat Opera Workshop 