Rest (work in progress)
Annie Lee composer and director
Anna-Maria Cadell (Person who is lost)
Viking Stendahl (Person who leaves midway)
Hana Yun-Stevens (Person who needs a nap)
Rest is a conceptual and interactive opera that subverts the fundamentals of music to highlight the power of rest – in both a musical and physical sense. The work stems from a musical score that consists entirely of rests. It explores what it is like to compose and perform opera, and the “rules” that come with it. Inspired by experiences of chronic pain, it questions notions of the body, sound and silence within our traditional expectations of opera. The rest is understated but powerful: it doesn’t always mean silence or an absence of music. With composed and improvised elements, the performers and audience create an intimate narrative of sounds and gestures about durational pain and comfort. This is compressed work of a longer piece which is still in development.
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 they 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.
Anna-Maria Cadell (b. 2001) is a third year BA student at the Slade School of Fine Art. She is interested in how and why everything exists, and is currently examining silence, because she thinks it might have something to do with where it all comes from and where it is moving towards.
Hana Yun-Stevens is an artist currently studying at the Slade School of Fine Art. Her practice focuses on the repurposing of discarded domestic objects. Within her practice, she references the notion of home and explores the diasporic condition through references to her own familial narrative. She is a recipient of the Painters’ Company Scholarship 2021.
Viking Stendahl (b. 2000) is a London-based artist currently enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art. As a means of making and queering space, Viking works across a range of media including sound, sculpture and video. His practice often explores ways in which the body can be used as a transgressive tool for disrupting an otherwise restrictive environment such as that of the institutional setting.
rough for opera 