26/01/21
Meet Me at Mahogany | New Works | Virtual Open House
Meet Me @ Mahogany: We Ask These Questions of Everybody
Join us for our first Meet Me @ Mahogany on Monday 22 February with Dr Charlotte Armstrong, Toria Banks and Amble Skuse
Meet Me @Mahogany is Mahogany Opera’s new virtual Open House where we share insights and ideas around what we do and how we do it, connecting people to our creative practice.
We began Meet Me @ Mahogany to bring more people into our conversations, strengthening our relationships and enriching our perspectives.
We plan to hold four Meet Me @ Mahogany events across the year with the first on Monday 22 February. These gatherings will be built around themes that relate to a particular strand or aspect of our work and look outwards to a larger question.
Each event will be a guided conversation with opportunities for you to ask questions and join the discussion. Hosted on Zoom, with live captioning and BSL interpretation, the events will be ticketed but free to attend.
Without a venue or defined home, Mahogany Opera envisions Meet Me @ Mahogany as a space for transformational thinking, where we can connect through our ideas and experiences.
Join us for our very first Meet Me @ Mahogany on Monday 22 February from 6 – 7.30pm GMT - please note that this event has already happened.
Dr Charlotte Armstrong (founder of the Opera and Disability blog) will guide a discussion with featured guests, Toria Banks (librettist/director) and Amble Skuse (composer) as they talk about disability theory, the creative process and their new opera We Ask These Questions of Everybody.
If the question is whose voices do we listen to, then putting that question within the context of opera gives it a whole other layer: about tonality, about training, about who gets which opportunities to learn to sing in which ways with which people…and all of these questions get layered up on top of the sociological questions of which voices we listen to.
Amble Skuse
We Ask These Questions of Everybody is a 50-minute live and digital operatic event sharing disabled people’s experiences under austerity in the UK, performed by an exceptional cross-genre, all-disabled ensemble, including Victoria Oruwari and Clarence Adoo MBE. With text drawn from real conversations; samples, soundscapes and singing, We Ask These Questions of Everybody shares radical, surprising and utopian disabled perspectives on self, society and the body. It includes captioning by visual artist Laura Spark, and integrated audio description.
Presented by HERA, We Ask These Questions of Everybody premieres as part of soundfestival on 29 January @ 5pm (GMT) & is then available to stream online till the end of February. The performance is free with no need to book. Just go to: http://bit.ly/QuestionsOfEverybody.
We Ask These Questions of Everybody was part of Mahogany Opera’s R&D festival, Various Stages in 2020; we supported some initial development time for the piece through online workshops with our artistic director, Frederic Wake-Walker. Read more about the workshops here >>>
