Global Work

The Naciketa Project

The Naciketa Project is a long-term process to include music, health and wellbeing practices and involving multiple partners in the UK and India, currently being piloted in a number of different areas. Further information and updates in early 2022. Naciketa is a chamber opera written by Nigel Osborne, composer, with libretto Ariel Dorfman, playwright and poet.

The Covid Pandemic postponed Naciketa three times during 2020 and 2021 and the originally planned full production of the opera will no longer take place. We will work towards a complete staged version in the future with UK and European partners.

The Complete Freedom of Truth

The Complete Freedom of Truth, our long term youth arts programme, which began in 2008 in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is incredibly vital to all of our work; this statement on the TCFT web site was written by a young participant. It works just as well for our new chamber opera, Naciketa

Music Mind and Body

Emeritus Professor of Music Nigel Osborne, composer, inventor and aid worker, along with linguist and musician is one of the world’s great animateurs in the use of music to help children with trauma from war and conflict, and those with disabilities. x-system, which Nigel co-invented with Professor Paul Robinson, some 13 years ago, is a new technology which accurately categorises music by its physical effect on the brain.

Other Work

Izazov!

is a project working with young people from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Italy and the UK supporting them to make documentary films around subjects that matter to them. Izazov! was part of the global AHRC project Changing the Story led by Leeds University.

https://changingthestory.leeds.ac.uk

Silent City

Was a community opera which we co-produced as part of Italy’s City of Culture 2019 in Matera, Italy. An extraordinary process, with music nurtured from the community by Nigel Osborne, libretto by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah and directed by James Bonas. The brilliant orchestra was Senza Spine from Bologna. More details on this blog page. Sadly, there is no film footage of the final performance but here are some photographs (Robert Golden) of the performance.

Get close to Opera

Opera Circus were one of the 5 partners invited to take part in an Erasmus + (KA2) research project called Get Close to Opera. The project lasted two years, finishing in September 2019 and was impressively well managed and led by Matera Hub. GCTO was awarded the title of Erasmus + Best Practice Project with a score of 98% out of 100%. Opera Circus worked with Foteini Galanopoulou European Project Manager and Access Advisor. With Foteini’s experience and support we produced the attached manual, An Inclusive Workshop Process.

Voices of Culture

In 2018 we were one of 35 organisations taking part in a conversation about Social Inclusion. This was held in Brussels and produced an interesting report; it was a great deal of work, unpaid in our case, and much discussion around what some of use felt inclusion entailed. Worth doing but there wasn’t enough time with so many voices to produce work of real value and to discuss the subject in real depth.

The Giufa Project

A beautiful process led and researched by Laura Fatini, writer, director based in Sarteano, Italy. Opera Circus ran a workshop day jointly at Glyndebourne with their Education Department and Darren Abrahams. Full information on this web site.

A film of the first workshop day. This led to a TCFT/Giufa residency at Battle in Sussex thanks to Chris Stones, Lucy Perry and Glyndebourne Education.

New Projects:

We have several new projects under discussion and looking forward to sharing the details when they are confirmed.

The Stumbling Stones

A work in progress exploration of a journey of a family to discover its past. The Merseyside based writer Julia Nelki wrote the book Villa Russo as an act of witness and of bringing together the history and threads of her family. Through doing so, she discovered characters and tales that she could never have imagined, and this production takes Julia’s voice and brings it to life on stage.