Senses/You Can't Kill the Spirit at The Cockpit

This event is part of: Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2024

Senses

Music: Roger Illingworth.
Words: Betty Francis, Roger Illingworth, Aga Serugo-Lugo, Dan Smith, Rose Malone-Illingworth

Senses is a dark, cabaret inspired song cycle for mezzo-soprano and jazz ensemble. A lyrical game of consequences; five writers were assigned a sense - taste, touch, sight, sound and smell. They then chose a character from literature to give voice to these senses: a jilted Miss Havisham (Dickens), a blind assassin (Atwood), a seething Medusa (Ovid), a scentless serial killer (Süsskind) and a Czechoslovakian autodactic drunkard (Hrabel). Musically, the number five runs through the work like a stick of rock, with pitch patterns based on fives and nested quint time signatures, woven into an angular and occasionally beautiful operatic jazz.

You Can't Kill the Spirit

Music and co-creator: Josh Kaye
Co-creators: Hestor Dart, Amy Kearsley

In 1982 30,000 women held hands and formed a human chain around the US nuclear missile base, Greenham Common. Over a 10-year period there was a camp of women activists who bore witness and protested the weapons stored on the site by the NATO forces.

This piece draws on interviews from friends of the composer Josh Kaye’s grandmother and explores how she was driven to activism in her 60’s. It is a co-creation between an all-female and minority gender group of singers and instrumentalists which will explore how the voice is a key tool of protest and resistance. Throughout the work the performers will create bold and powerful vocal textures whilst telling the very human story standing up for a cause. The work will explore not only the historic importance of Greenham, but the relevance of protest in an increasingly intolerant and oppressive political landscape.

This will be a work-in progress performance of between 10 and 15 minutes which will be developed into a larger work which will be toured around sites close to Greenham in 2025.