03.05.23 The Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells

PROGRAMME ANNOUNCEMENT 03.02.23

WORKS AND MAKERS

Rest

Annie Lee (composer)

her bed // dream wake piece (working title)

Calla Esperanza (composer) Hannah Calascione (director)

belly/back 

Ella Jarman-Pinto and Jennifer Farmer

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Rest 

Annie Lee (composer)

Rest is a conceptual opera that subverts the fundamentals of music to highlight the power of rest – in both a musical score and physical sense. Inspired by experiences of chronic pain, it brings to question notions of the body, comfort, sound and silence within our traditional expectations of opera. 

Annie Lee is a multidisciplinary composer-performer-artist currently studying in London, UK. Within their Fine Art degree at the Slade School of Fine Art, Annie works with their discomfort of the elitist art environment through ideas of performance and sound and deprioritising the visual painting-on-the-wall. Their practice involves writing musical notation with the flexibility of improvisation and technical in-accuracies to question tradition and bring awareness to what can be made and heard from what is not written down. Annie (b. 1999) grew up in London, playing piano but never with the confidence to perform herself. In 2020 Annie collaborated with photographers, filmmakers and music makers in It All Comes Down, a project with the Barbican Centre. As a communications representative for the Disabled Students Network, they are passionate about inclusivity and breaking down barriers to make experiencing music, performance, and art more accessible to everyone. 

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her bed // dream wake piece (working title)

 Calla Esperanza (composer) Hannah Calascione (director)

A girl lies in bed, adrift between waking and sleeping. This piece explores self actualisation through voice within the transfem experience.

Calla Esperanza is a musician and cross-arts collaborator currently studying for a masters in composition at Guildhall School of Music and Drama (GSMD). She primarily works with text scores due to their accessibility to performers with different experiences and skillsets; she is excited by the way this openness often expands the work beyond the limitations of her own ideas and breaks down boundaries between composers, performers and audiences. Calla recently collaborated with with choreographer Sophia Morton, working closely with the dancers and, with the help of a dancer-vocalist, developed a piece melding movement and vocalisation. The piece was performed at The Place (December 1st/2nd 2022). In 2018/19, she worked with Hannah Calascione on a play called All the Little Lights. First she created a score that was realised live, using MaxMSP, allowing her to respond to the actors in real time; this version was performed at GSMD. Then she created a fixed media version for a run of the play at Tristan Bates Theatre. For her undergraduate degree, she studied electronic music at GSMD. During that time she founded the Guildhall Experimental Music Society to foster a low stakes environment in which musicians could try out new ideas.

Hannah Calascione is an award-winning director and dramaturg. Her work interrogates the world’s systems, and is usually interdisciplinary, sensory and curious. She holds an MFA in theatre directing from Birkbeck, a BA in anthropology & politics from Cambridge, and a diploma in horticulture. She is currently working on a new show about land ownership, worship, and ecological justice called Green Satanic Thrills, at Camden People’s Theatre. She is also developing a verbatim play, Next of Kin, exploring alternative kinship models in collaboration with the Institute of Womens Health (UCL). Much of her work is music driven. In 2018 she collaborated with Calla Esperanza in her production of All the Little Lights  by Jane Upton, winning an OffWestEnd Award in 2020. She was commissioned by HOME, ¡Viva! Festival 2019 to create Four Seasons of Buenos Aires with Manchester Camerata Orchestra. In 2021 she collaborated with composer Sarah Angliss and Fabula Collective to create a new adaptation of a Japanese play, Camellia. She recently appeared in the chorus of Waste Paper Opera’s Dead Cat Bounce at Somerset House, and is often found in informal choirs and music-making groups. She produces and delivers cross-arts learning programmes, currently at the Barbican Centre and the Roundhouse.

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belly/back 

Ella Jarman-Pinto and Jennifer Farmer

A co-creation between Ella Jarman-Pinto and Jennifer Farmer, belly/back will be an interactive communal opera evoking what it means to not only retain, but to centre your softness when existing in a Black, neurodivergent femme body. It is a collaboration with artists and organisations of African heritage that draws on stone circles and other spaces made sacred through ancestral knowledge and ritual. 

Ella Jarman-Pinto is a critically acclaimed storytelling composer, described in 2020 as ‘one of the UK’s most exciting music-makers’ by Classic FM and recognised by Women Of The Year Lunch 2021. In 2021 Ella received BBC Radio 3’s flagship commission for International Women’s Day. Producer Olwen Fisher, who commissioned Ella, said of the music: ‘It is a piece of such power and beauty that it took my breath away.’ Ella focuses her music on storytelling, working with Directors, Writers, Librettists & Poets who reject the phrase ‘this is how things are done here’, and whose stories move towards positive change. Recent works include: :Insert Expletive Here: (2022) explores lived experiences of racism. Commissioned by East London Music Group, Matthew Hardy, Artistic Director said that ‘it was clear how much [the piece] made many people think about these ideas that they hadn’t engaged with in the past’. Girls Are Coming Out Of The Woods (Poet Tishani Doshi, for Soprano and Piano), was commissioned by Donne, Women In Music and premiered at Royal Albert Hall in October 2022. Founder Gabriella Di Laccio: ‘Everytime I read [through the piece] I have goosebumps’. Ella’s album, Lemon Verbena, with poet Jo Brandon, (funded by PRS Foundation and Kickstarter), will be released Winter 2023.

A queer African-American writer for performance and facilitator, Jennifer Farmer centres and collaborates with systematically excluded narratives and communities, such as disenfranchised young people (The Fall of Lucifer, 2008; Truth or Dare, 2012 and 2017, Belgrade Theatre), womxn in prison (Compact Failure, Clean Break national tour, 2004), young people w/dyslexia and autism (Turtle Key Arts), refugees/displaced communities (Hear My Voice, TRSE), users of the mental healthcare system (V&A Museum) and intergenerational community groups (Urban Dreams, London Bubble, 2008 and City Final, site-specific, 2018, Belgrade Theatre). Other work includes: Looking At the Sun (BAC Opera Season, 2001), clean (BBC Radio 3, 2003), words, words, words (Tricycle Theatre, 2006), Bulletproof Soul (Birmingham Rep, 2007), Waltzing Tomatoes (Ithaca Gallery, USA, 2013 and international festivals) and Between Constellations (Pittsburgh Festival Opera, USA; Grimeborn Festival, Arcola Theatre, 2018). Recent projects include Link In My Bio, an interactive opera, supported by enoa, Britten Pears Arts, and TVL, on the global rise of the Alt-Right; How Far Apart, commissioned by Utopia Theatre and supported by the Wellcome Trust, examining medical racism’s impact on Black women’s experience of childbirth; the dream(ing) field lab’s another garden (will be our city) (Toynbee Studios, 2021), commissioned by Julie’s Bicycle and Artsadmin to facilitate Black women/femmes in re-visioning their relationship with environmental inequality.

for more information about Rough for Opera #18 – Relaxed contact abigail@secondmovement.org.uk