They Called Her Salt: A multi-sensory opera experience (2020)

for women with learning disabilities and friends

This project was funded by the Arts Council England in collaboration with Powerhouse for Women and Goldsmiths, University of London.

Project Description: An inclusive experiment with opera, lemons and a pinch of Salt

They Called Her Salt was an ambitious inclusive undertaking that brought differently-abled performers together through a multi-sensory opera experience. The project retold the Orpheus myth, from the perspective of a woman in a wheelchair. I wrote a modern version of the story, sensitive to the perspective of Eurydice. Together with the women from Powerhouse - a charity for women with learning disabilities based in East London - and our creative team, we devised the performance content together over a series of interactive workshops. In our mythological mash-up, gendered motifs of ‘looking back’ ‘invisibility’ and ‘not turning around’ were revaluated to address power imbalance, violence and clichés of female passivity and disability.

The form ‘opera experience’ described the multi-arts event inspired by works from the opera canon such as Monteverdi’s Orfeo. In our workshops sessions, we translated the different characters of the story into tactile, musical and visual compositions. The story and directing style also cared for what can be called a ‘neurodiverse aesthetic’ with a focus on material, textures, and colours.

One of the highlights for the women and the team, besides our sold out Valentine’s Day performance at the Applecart Arts Theatre, was a masterclass with Australian mezzo soprano Catherine Carby, who performed two arias from Handle’s Guilio Cesare. In devising responses to these two arias, lemons played an important role for our performers.

Theatrical Concept: “The snow is like the salt” - multi-sensory composition and inclusive performance culture

In 2019, English National Opera and other renowned opera houses rediscovered the various facets of Orpheus adaptations. At about the same time, I started thinking about a story that would suit an opera project tailored to the special needs and the unique perspective of women with learning disabilities. Though the big West End productions addressed questions of gender, power and exploitation, the actual plot had not been examined as a collection of metaphors of gendered disability, especially not for a differently-abled audience. Ideas of stillness, inability to move freely, or locations such as a garden or the underground made for an innovative playground for inclusive musical theatre-making.

To gain a tactile element, I cross-pollinated the Orfeo-myth with a similar story from the Western canon: the biblical tale of Lot and his wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt. Both stories revolve around taking away female agency through making invisible and saw ‘disabling bodies’ as a form of punishment. From a contemporary perspective, this value judgement at the intersection of disability and gender demanded re-examination. Thus, salt as material and multi-faceted concept became a sensory leitmotif in our workshops: Our main character took shape in form of salt dough sculptures, song lyrics and as ingredient for our shaker-instruments. Translating the idea of the operatic leitmotif into multi-sensory composition became one of the guiding creatives processes.

Our own avant-garde compositions were then combined collage-style with pieces from Monteverdi’s Orfeo into a story performance that involved the audience, too.

For more information about the project: Find a digital version of our programme here.