Pop Up Opera Performance at Wimbledon Foundation
We are beyond thrilled to announce that we have been awarded funding by the Wimbledon Foundation’s new Arts and Community Engagement Fund (ACE) to create our next Merton Street Opera!
Following on from the success of Drifting Dragons (2016) and Cosi Fan Tutte (2017) we are now re-imagining Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus for free unticketed high street performances enabling everyone to experience high quality professional opera for free.
Die Fledermaus is a hugely fun, often silly story with some brilliant characters and very catchy tunes. We know it’s going to be great fun adapting this for modern high street performances – like our previous productions, in English, approximately one hour in duration with scenes popping up in shops, pubs, supermarkets and libraries! Die Fledermaus means ‘The Revenge of the Bat’ but in our modern version Bat Man may play a role! The music has some waltzes this time round so hope you fancy waltzing down the high street with us!
St Teresa’s Primary School opera workshop
The amazing ACE fund over 2018-2019 will enable us not only to adapt Die Fledermaus for the high street and present the free unticketed performances across Merton and Wandsworth but also allows us to continue and develop our extensive outreach programme teaching even more young people across South London about opera and engaging even more elderly who may not be able to follow our promenade performance live along the high street. But not only are we are looking forward to these workshops for local schools and community lunch clubs, but we are particularly excited that as an extension of our previous outreach we are able to offer two local young people’s groups, one primary and one secondary, an opportunity to create their own version of Die Fledermaus working with a professional Director and Musical Director over an extended period of time. Partnering again with the brilliant Merton Music Foundation and local children’s charity Jigsaw4u we are thrilled to be able to offer this exciting opportunity to these two groups.
So now we’re going to be hard at work planning Die Fledermaus so our next street opera project can be even bigger and better than before! We’ll keep you updated with developments as we go along – firstly getting cracking on cutting the opera down to an hour, adapting the story for modern life suitable to be performed along the high street, and re-writing the music and libretto! Speaking of which we are delighted to tell you that this will be by our same team as for Cosi Fan Tutte – the talented Leo Geyer re-writing the music and Baseless Fabric Artistic Director Joanna Turner re-writing the libretto (words).
A huge thank you to the Wimbledon Foundation for this fantastic opportunity and to the support of all of our followers. It’s an exciting time for the Baseless Fabric team!
