We loved our two performances at the Sedgwick Museum on St Patrick's Day. Hope you got a chance to play with the hippo stamp!
 We launched The Barrington Hippo today with a geology workshop at St Andrew's School, Soham. Here is Matthew Brady from Cambridge University getting ready to give the Year 5s a crash course in sedimentology. My personal favourite was flour sprinkled on water and falling through it to the bottom to show how chalk is formed by the tiny skeletons of algae sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Who knew that there used to be an ocean here?!!  I wrote this for The Wordsworth Trust website, all about the why and how of making The Rime of the Ancient Mariner into an opera:
wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2017/08/07/the-albatross-from-rime-to-opera/  Tidy desk, tidy mind...? I'm experimenting with paper birds. It's easy enough to get a shape that's evocative of a bird, but funnily enough the tapered wings make it very hard to make the movement bird-like. A rectangular shape seems to be more effective. I'm also reading this treasure (Logbook for Grace, by Robert Cushman Murphy):  It's the memoir of a naturalist who shipped on board an old-time New Bedford whaler and sailed to the Antarctic seas. He wrote: 'I now belong to the higher cult of mortals, for I have seen the albatross! ... Near by, in the morning sunlight, flew the long-anticipated bird, even more majestic, more supreme in its element, than my imagination had pictured.'
 When I met artist Bruce Pearson yesterday he told me all about his travels in the great Southern oceans, drawing and painting albatrosses: 'Their flight so liquid, a free-flowing series of sweeps and arcs with barely a flap of the wings'.
It's all part of the preparation for a collaboration with Cambridge Conservation Initiative and Birdlife International: the making of a new opera called The Albatross with composer Kim Ashton. There's a work-in-progress showing on 11 August, 7pm, at RADA Studios, as part of Tête-à-tête: The Opera Festival 2017.  London (Raphaela Papadakis) closes the show at the Temple Church.
My warmest thanks on behalf of all the artists to our supporters, donors, and audience, who believed in the work, and made it possible. Photography by Chris Christodoulou. Design by Kitty Callister. Lighting Design by Jelmer Tuinstra.  London (Raphaela Papadakis) surveys one of her creatures - the Law Student (Alessandro Fisher).
A big thank you to our attentive and generous audience last night. Show #2 tonight (7:30pm); Show #3 tomorrow (6pm) at the Temple Church. Photograph by Chris Christodoulou. By the way, the libretto is online - you can read it here.
Today, my day went like this: in the morning - attaching reflective backing on to shards of mirror; sticky pads on the bottom of the orchestra chairs; camping lights on the pulpit staircase; pots of tea and plenty of washing up. In the afternoon, our final session of working notes with the singers, when we pared back some action and made the two ensemble scenes look a bit less crowded, to help the audience see more clearly. Then in the evening I got to do some simple bits of make-up (making London's feet dirty, for example!), which was great for calming my nerves, and then we did our final rehearsal - lights, costume, orchestra, singing, and a small audience of friends and family. My biggest fear was that the singers would be blinded by the lights, which were new to them, but actually the challenge was that the conductor and orchestra were under-lit - a massive challenge for them at the time but thankfully an easy one to solve for next time. After the rehearsal, we all breathed a big sigh of relief, then the lighting designer, lighting technician and I spent a couple of hours tweaking the lighting states and making the fiery glow a bit bolder.
Tomorrow - world premiere of *And London Burned*. So, logging on is not the best way to wind down after a long day of rehearsal and a long evening of lighting, but that's how it goes at this stage - home to check emails, sleep, then back to the venue. Tech week for And London Burned at the Temple Church. It goes one step at a time - staging with piano; staging with piano and costume; singing (without staging) with orchestra; staging with orchestra; then finally staging with orchestra, costume and lighting. At each step, the overall goal might seem insurmountable, but we have to take them one at a time, and to remember that it always feels like this at this stage. The transformation of the beautiful Temple Church into a dramatic space has been amazing to watch. Soon we'll have photos to show you...
Onwards... |
Sinéad O'NeillDirector, producer, cold-water swimmer. Archives
March 2018
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