Application to Jerwood Opera Writing Fellowship

Why do you want to participate in the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme (maximum 250 words)

My current work (since 2003) explores the interrelationship between composition, digital technology and intermedia/ interdisciplinary performance. I describe this as Sound Theatre - an experimental interdisciplinary performance concept combining field recordings, live music, the mental ‘seeing’ evoked from sound and a theatre performance environment. Here the confluence of the vivid see-hearing 'dimension' evoked by sound, the intrinsic creative listening act of music, and the theatre of ‘seeing through other peoples eyes’ creates an aural landscape; a sense of place that the mind projects back onto sound it hears.

These pieces function using the phenomenological qualities of sound, music and theatre and can be described as a cinema without a screen; a play without actors or a set: a living dream of hallucinogenic clarity. However this mediated performance concept raises some significant issues that this practice-as-research aims to address:

- The experience and subjectivity of sound led theatre

- The phenomenology of the voice in Sound Theatre

- The connection between live voice and the disembodied voice

- The relationship between the imagined; the recalled and the perceptual spaces in-between.

Having journeyed through jazz, pop and improvised music; conceptual and experimental composition; sound art, electroacoustic music and composition for performance, I am keen – excited even – to understand how this Sound Theatre approach would work with other disciplines. What is the creative open space that lays in-between disciplines? How do we, creative artists, make sense of this space and what do we create within it?

What does ‘Opera’ mean to you and how relevant is it as an art form in the 21st century?

Opera - to me - is a whole experience borne from a true collaboration of the intrinsic creative acts of listening, seeing and being. Crucially it is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the senses and language; between perception, memory and imagination. Its creation - and its dramaturgy – should be more than the mingling of art forms surrounding a central ‘story’. Beyond this understanding, however, I have only questions:

Q: What is the area of creative, open space suspending the disciplines that opera sits amongst?

Q: How do artists embed one discipline within the other so as they co-exist and become fused and inseparable?

Q: How do contemporary artists embrace the ‘wholeness’ of ideas in opera and allow the dramatic flow of experience to comes from within each individual?

Furthermore, new technology brings with it new means and new meanings, not just in the arts but also in our lives. As society and culture becomes more global our understanding of the wholeness of our individual existence and experience of life becomes more complex, and therefore can only be retold using the different sense modalities working in polyphony. As such, our understanding of who we are, relies on an exchange between the body and the mind, mediating all the senses with the imagined, the existential and the metaphysical. Opera, therefore, is the ideal place to develop this ‘whole’ polyphony of sense, memory, imagination and dream, and to explore these new means and new meanings.