Puzzled Up! An intergenerational opera of memories project series(since 2019)
in collaboration with Opera Holland Park.
Project description: A walk through opera park
In Spring 2019, Opera Holland’s Inspire programme asked me to come up with a concept to bring inclusive opera projects together under the theme of memory and intergenerational remembering. The groups we are offering workshops for are diverse, from day centres for adults with special needs to school programmes. The shared aim of the workshops is to translate the multi-sensory art form of opera into three-dimensional sculpture-size puzzle pieces. The pieces will be exhibited over the next three years as part of Opera Holland Park’s summer seasons. In addition, every piece will gain a digital, audio component. Opera visitors to Holland Park will able can access the sound content via their smart devices when walking through our puzzled up memory exhibition.
“the members of your group […] did an excellent job. I was very impressed by the way they interacted in a respectful manner ensuring that they included everyone. [Puzzled Up! Snowflakes] was an inclusive and person-centred workshop series inviting very active and positive participation from everyone involved.”
Theatrical concept: The sound and look of memories
Common features of a style that represents memory or remembering on the theatre stage are a fragmented, associated and rhizomatic arrangements of content in space. Puzzled Up! makes use of this free stylistic approach to produce an inclusive opera experience for diverse participants and audience members alike at Holland Park.
The idea of opening up spatial conventions of opera making with a more fluid and inclusive approach corresponds to the aesthetic of so called theatres of memory. In drama circles, memory theatre describes a theatrical style that links scenes as scraps through association in space. Fluidly, scenes can grow out of each other, their arrangement or installments in space appears like pieces that morph into a different time setting or zoom into another memory fragment. This is a potent framework to express alternative ways of storytelling.
For our project, the conceptual aesthetic idea is visualised through the unique puzzle pieces we create in workshop series. Every piece leaves a trace for the the visitor of a project that happened in the past and which, itself, had questions of memory-making and remembering at its centre. The puzzle pieces document the processes of music-theatre-making as action art, displacing notions of completion or the finished preservation of a memory. The installations are accessible for many different learning types as they comprise visual, tactile and other sensory elements. Digitally, visitors can interact by accessing audio content or leaving their own memory notes through QR codes that are located near the pieces. This engagement continues the process of collective memory-making.
Puzzled Up! re-conceives ideas of what opera can be in an age of inclusion. It reshapes the ‘opera-going’ experience in three-dimensional space and makes use of the many different art forms that come together to produce the audio-visual spectacle of music theatre.
