Louisa & Giles at the Autumn Rose Club
It’s a sad time but we’ve come to the end of our amazing Die Fledermaus project over the past 18 months. We’re looking back on everything that we’ve achieved and all the brilliant people we’ve met, especially the fantastic young people in our Opera Taster Workshops and Parallel Productions and the wonderful older people in our sessions for elderly groups. We’ve had such fun in all the different activities of the project and are so proud of what everyone’s achieved.
In our final part of the project after the busyness of the summer performances, we visited 5 different organisations across Merton and Wandsworth who provide activities for local elderly people supporting them in times of difficulties and loneliness. It feels important for us to partner with organisations such as these since the format of our unique street opera concept is that it requires people to be able to stand and walk around the high street (up to 60mins if they want to see the whole performance) which means we’re not very accessible to the physically frail who may not be up to that. So visiting these groups enables us to make our work accessible to them.
Louisa & Giles at Regenerate Rise Putney
As many people in these groups can’t follow us down the high street we take the street opera to them! We edit the filming from our street opera performances so we can show videos of our street opera performances and talk to the groups about what we’re aiming to do in terms of making high-quality
professional opera accessible to everyone as they’re going about their daily lives in shops, supermarkets, pubs and libraries. And our wonderful singer Louisa Tee (who played Fiordiligi in our 2018 production of Cosi Fan Tutte) and Wimbledon-based pianist Giles Kennedy performed sections of our modern English adaptations of both Die Fledermaus and Cosi for the groups – as well as giving them an insight to their careers as professional musicians and the work of our company.
We had some great feedback from these groups, especially with several of the sessions leading to impromptu sing-alongs – such as singing ‘Amazing Grace’ with the Autumn Rose Club in Balham! And of course we love hearing feedback such as this after our sessions –
“The interactive performance was brilliant. Z stopped me in the corridor asking when they would be coming again. She particularly enjoyed the intimacy of the presentation and felt so involved. Many of the ladies, couldn’t believe how high the standard of singing was and were blown away. One lady explained how she had never been to the opera and would now love to go!”
That’s just what we like to hear! 🙂
