 Week 1 of rehearsals at Glyndebourne - what fun! The mood board really helps...  For supertitles for the Barber of Seville, you need a lot of (a) insults and (b) imprecations.
************************************************* 337.0 - Scoundrel! Wretch! - Dastardly gold-digger! ************************************************* 338.0 Show some respect, sir! (For God’s sake, take care!) ************************************************* 339.0 ************************************************* 339.5 - Blundering baboon! - Gin-soaked cretin! ************************************************* 339.7 - I want to scream! ************************************************* 340.0 - I want to scream! - I want to kill him! ************************************************* 341.1 ************************************************* 341.5 Somebody's knocking! ************************************************* 341.51 Somebody's knocking! Who could it be? ************************************************* 341.6 ************************************************* 341.7 Who is it? ************************************************* 342.0 Police! Open up! ************************************************* 343.0 The police! Oh my God! *************************************************  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. |
Sinéad O'NeillDirector, producer, cold-water swimmer Archives
May 2019
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