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‘Opera’ festival is a changing scene
The Almeida Summer Festival is challenging its own creative boundaries, writes Simon Wroe
WHEN the stately tragedy of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm draws to a close at the Almeida next week, you might expect another classically accomplished tour de force to fill its shoes.
Instead, the Islington venue will host an opera about a murdered sex tourist, a Sierra Leonean harmonica player, and an avant-garde musical ensemble that play pianos without touching the keys.
Throughout July the Almeida Summer Festival stretches the repertoire into the realms of modern art with a Tate Modern collaboration on the works of Cy Twombly. There’s also a one-man American play, Nocturne, scored by a composer of the Royal College of Fashion, and a week-long residency by a British-African theatre group.
It’s a big departure for a theatre that puts on a small handful of spotless shows every year, as Jenny Worton, the Almeida’s artistic associate, acknowledges.
“Usually the risks we have to take are limited, in terms of material,” she says. “If you’re an emerging writer the chances of you getting your show on at the Almeida are quite slim. Over the summer, we can be more experimental.”
The Summer Festival has evolved from the theatre’s long-established opera festival. The pieces chosen retain a strong musical bent, but theatrical elements have also crept to the fore this year, for the first time.
Working alongside the Almeida’s artistic director Michael Attenborough, Worton has sourced a catalogue of curiosities.
From her office she has been listening to the strains of Ocean of Rain, a new “soundscape” opera by Yannis Kyriakides and Daniel Danis.
Adam Rapp, a playwright little known outside his native America, performs the monologue Nocturne; Philip Neil Martin has been commissioned to create a score especially for it.
There are collaborations with the Dutch electronic ensemble mae and local Islington theatre company Tiata Fahodzi, which translates as “theatre for the emancipated”.
An African music concert will close the season and Barb Jungr sings a special selection of her songs for one night only.
Worton, 30, whose career spans the Tricycle, Bush and National theatres, stresses the Almeida’s artistic involvement in all the pieces: “We’re not just a receiving house. We see the entire process through from beginning to end.”
She adds: “I hope the quality of the work you’ll see will always be at Almeida standard, and that when people come and see something, even if it’s not to their taste, they will always admire the quality of the work
“Hopefully, it will introduce new audiences, but I’m also hoping it will challenge existing ones.”
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