Well, we’ve had a pretty fantastic couple of weeks meeting lots of different people, hearing their amazing real life stories and getting their ideas for what our opera about friendship should be about. We’re feeling totally inspired by everyone and feel very lucky to have met both older people who’ve led such fascinating lives and young people who’ve got so many great ideas!
Raynes Park High School Workshop
For our young people’s workshops we had great fun leading workshops for Wimbledon Park Primary School, Raynes Park High School, the Merton Youth Concert Band and the 4th Morden Girls’ Brigade to teach them about the process of creating stories and song writing. Thanks so much everyone who was involved for all your fantastic ideas. I didn’t realise digging to China with spoons was such a common childhood activity!
Greg and I now have a strong idea of what the story of our piece is – the overall idea is inspired by various conversations with everyone, specific storyline ideas that have come up in our workshops with young people or via our online questionnaire, and little bits of personal stories or short lines people have said are making their way into the libretto. Greg is now hard at work writing the music for these first few songs (or arias and duets) and I’m busy casting our singers to help us bring the piece to life in rehearsal. We’ll be holding a sharing to invite everyone to give feedback on what we’ve done so far so stay tuned…!
P.S. If you haven’t yet filled in our online questionnaire and would like to be involved please do so here
