In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes Thom Andrewes The task of mapping London’s independent music theatre scene presents both significant challenges and rare opportunities. Any such survey must reckon with the city’s huge scale, the breadth of creative activity that it contains and the relative fragmentariness of this activity. Another challenge is presented by the phrase ‘independent music theatre’ itself. Recent literature on music theatre has stressed the vagueness of the term in an English-speaking context: specifically its interchangeability with ‘musical theatre’ or ‘musicals’. According to Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi, ‘music theatre’ is ‘essentially a coinage taken from the Germanic form ‘Musiktheater’, yet it has since ‘been widely appropriated for almost any kind of serious musical theatre’.1 It is true that there is no precise English equivalent to the German ‘Musiktheater’ in its narrow sense, but it has also been suggested that the UK lacks a strong tradition of the kind of work that such a term would describe. Matthias Rebstock has emphasised the continued importance of both the traditions of ‘aesthetically advanced musicals’ and ‘new chamber operas’ in the UK, which he (rather contentiously) describes as one of the ‘countries where the 1950s and 1960s avant-garde played no meaningful role’.2 Similarly, much of Salzman and Desi’s brief discussion of ‘new music theatre’ in Britain is given over to what could unproblematically be described as chamber opera or musicals. It should be said that there are examples where ‘music theatre’ has been used quite systematically in a British context, in order to connote precisely the kind of ‘progressive’ aspirations that the term is meant to capture. A key example is the early work of the so-called Manchester School: Alexander Goehr, Harrison 1 2 Salzman, Eric/Desi, Thomas: The New Music Theatre. Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body, New York: Oxford University Press 2008, pp. 4-5. For contemporary evidence of this usage, see the National Theatre’s Genesis Music Theatre Group, an initiative set up in 2017 to support the creation of new musicals. Rebstock, Matthias: ‘Varieties of Independent Music Theatre in Europe’, in Manfred Brauneck/ITI Germany (eds): Independent Theatre in Contemporary Europe, Bielefeld: transcript 2017, pp. 529, 535. 112 Thom Andrewes Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell-Davies. In his foreword to Michael Hall’s Music Theatre in Britain, 1960-1975, Goehr carefully differentiates what he calls ‘our’ music theatre from ‘the senior American version’ (i.e. musical theatre).3 He associates this new direction not only with European contemporaries like Kagel and Ligeti, but also with Britten, whose ‘ambivalence’ about opera led to ‘new forms of presentation’ and the creation of new structures to accommodate them. In this sense, the undeniable influence of Britten’s legacy in the UK does not only signify a conservative attachment to opera, but also a specific reformist usage of ‘music theatre’.4 In addition, the term continues to be used by British composers keen to position their work within a certain international tradition. Nevertheless, ‘music theatre’ has no real disciplinary orbit in the UK. There are practically no institutional structures – venues, festivals, funding sources or publications – that are organised around that term, as opposed to opera, musicals or ‘interdisciplinary performance’. But this is where the task of mapping the current state of music theatre in London provides a rare opportunity. The city’s lack of a centralised, self-identifying ‘music theatre scene’ gives me the excuse to look further afield for the kind of work that could call itself ‘music theatre’ if it were so inclined. As a result, this survey attempts to bridge a number of different scenes, each situated in its own institutional and disciplinary terrain: opera, theatre, new music, visual art, dance, cabaret and Live Art. Despite sharing aesthetic concerns and processes, some of these scenes seem almost non-conversant; however, they all have points of overlap, with a few key artists moving between them or working in their interstices. A number of interacting factors make London a unique context for artistic production at the dawn of the 2020s. After decades of globalisation and neoliberal policy, rents are high, work is precarious and both free time and free space are at a premium.5 Despite the UK’s shifting place within the global community, London still attracts international artists and students, who import their own ambitions and ideas of what is possible. As a result of regional inequalities in the UK’s economic development, artistic activity is disproportionately concentrated in London, even as this activity is increasingly reliant on unpaid labour and private economic and social capital on the part of the artists. The UK’s funding landscape is scarred by over a decade of economic austerity; Arts Council England – the public body responsible for distributing funds in the form of project grants and fouryear structural grants – encourages non-profit organisations to seek a mixture of 3 4 5 Hall, Michael: Music Theatre in Britain, 1960-1975, Woodbridge: Boydell 2015, p. x. This can be traced from Britten’s own English Opera Group (renamed the English Music Theatre Company in 1975), via Goehr’s Music Theatre Ensemble, to companies like the Modern Music Theatre Troupe, Music Theatre London and Music Theatre Wales. See Harvie, Jen: Fair Play. Art, Performance and Neoliberalism, Basingstoke: Pallgrave Macmillan 2013. In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes public, private and charitable income to increase ‘resilience’.6 In order to justify its own funding, the Arts Council continues to make claims regarding the ‘value’ and ‘impact’ of the arts (in terms of economic growth and social wellbeing), which determine its own grant-giving criteria while sustaining a wider debate about access, participation and audiences that permeates the UK’s artistic discourse.7 In this chapter, I look at how these conditions have helped determine the direction of new music theatre production in London since the 2000s. As an anchor for my survey, I have selected three key ‘nodes’ in London’s music theatre network – the Tête à Tête Festival, Battersea Arts Centre and the London Contemporary Music Festival – chosen because they knit together a number of discrete disciplinary terrains while still representing clear curatorial projects that have proven influential within their wider sectors. As part of my research, I interviewed representatives from each organisation, alongside a further fifteen artists and companies whose work regularly appears in their programmes.8 Interviewees discussed the evolution of their artistic practices or organisational missions, their go-to creation processes and support structures, as well as being given the chance to describe their own work in terms of genre and locate it within a particular local, national or international scene. While there is a unique value to artists’ own conceptions of their work and its context, I have tried to supplement this by pursuing the kind of aesthetic correspondences that can often be obscured by medium and discipline. To do so, I have turned frequently to performance studies as a discourse that can accommodate all of this work on equal terms. Thus, the core of this chapter is a parallel presentation of two burgeoning scenes – gig theatre and composer-performer collectives – which both seem to reflect the same overall aesthetic, structural and material trends in quite different ways. Framing this are sections charting the related migration of the term ‘opera’, from the collapse of London’s mid-scale opera infrastructure to a new wave of operas being made in performance art spaces. Viewed as a whole, these trends invite us to reconsider the supposed absence or disappearance of an ‘independent music theatre scene’ in the UK and to tailor our investigation 6 7 8 See www.artscouncil.org.uk/make-case-art-and-culture/why-art-and-culture-matters [last accessed 11.09.2019]. See Hewison, Robert: Cultural Capital. The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain, London: Verso 2014; also https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/why-culture-matters/case-art-and-culture [last accessed 17.02.2019]. These artists/companies are as follows: ARCO, Bastard Assignments, Christopher Brett Bailey, Patrick Eakin Young, Catherine Kontz, Little Bulb Theatre, Lore Lixenberg, London Topophobia, Elaine Mitchener, Jenny Moore, Ergo Phizmiz, Second Movement, Third Ear, Waste Paper Opera and Weisslich. With no strong link to any of the three ‘nodes’, Patrick Eakin Young and Third Ear are the odd ones out here; as such, they are included as the mid-scale, internationally orientated exceptions that prove the rule. 113 114 Thom Andrewes to the current aesthetic preoccupations of British artists by asking: ‘What do we mean by “music”?’ and ‘What do we mean by “theatre”?’ Tête à Tête and the new opera scene Hall’s history of British music theatre ends with a brief discussion of contemporary organisations whose work appears to fit this tradition. Chief among these is the Tête à Tête Festival – in Hall’s words, ‘an annual festival that actively seeks new works, many of which fall into the category of Music Theatre rather than full-scale opera’.9 The festival was founded in 2007 by the eponymous opera company, who specialise in commissioning and producing new small-scale work. Initially based at Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios, the festival moved to Kings Cross in 2014: a move that coincided with that district’s intensive redevelopment. As a result of highly strategic partnerships brokered by the developers, Tête à Tête fills the area with performances every summer, from the drama-school theatres of RADA and Central Saint Martins to nearby venues like Kings Place and The Place, and an outdoor stage erected in the new ‘civic square’. The festival was established partly as a response to a cut in Tête à Tête’s funding.10 Instead of reducing the amount of work the company made, artistic director Bill Bankes-Jones responded by looking for ways to make even more work, while sheltering this activity from the vicissitudes of the UK’s funding environment. As a result, every aspect of the festival is leveraged to maximise the creation of new work: multiple shows are scheduled every evening, free ‘pop-up operas’ are mounted in foyers and courtyards, commissions are split between a number of very short ‘Lite Bite’ operas, and companies are given the minimal amount of time needed for their get-in and tech rehearsal. In this way, Tête à Tête has presented over 500 new works in its first eleven years. Since moving to Kings Cross, this maximalist approach to programming has been promoted by the festival’s developer partners, with ad hoc street performances and site-specific ‘happenings’ all adding to a carnivalesque atmosphere, valuable in terms of ‘place-making’.11 9 10 11 Michael Hall: Music Theatre in Britain, 1960-1975, p. 292. For the company’s early production and funding history, see Devlin, Graham/Ackrill, Judith: The Small and Middle Scale Opera and Music Theatre Sector in England, London: Graham Devlin Associates 2010, pp. 109-112. In 2011, after a number of unsuccessful attempts, Tête à Tête was awarded structural funding by the Arts Council as one of their 2012-15 National Portfolio Organisations. Their annual grant of just over £100,000 was renewed for the 2015-18 and 2018-22 periods. Nevertheless, the festival remains heavily reliant on partnerships, donations from individual patrons and charitable trusts, and the artists’ own fundraising. In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes Figure 1: Pop Up Opera at the 2015 Tête à Tête Festival Credit: Laurel Turton Much of Tête à Tête’s programming fits traditional definitions of music theatre.12 Productions occupy black-box theatres, concert stages and unconventional spaces, last between 30-60 minutes, and feature small casts and ensembles. Sets and props are kept to a minimum. The festival abounds with monodramas and staged song-cycles, testifying to the enduring influence of Maxwell-Davies. Yet while some participating companies call their own work ‘music theatre’, the festival itself has an almost evangelical attachment to the word ‘opera’.13 On the one hand, this indicates a desire on the part of Bankes-Jones to reclaim the term. Rather than leave opera to ossify around a closed canon of classics, reproduced by a prescribed performance practice, his aim is to place new work at the centre of the opera discourse. It suggests a belief in the malleability and fluidity of a category like ‘opera’, which is demonstrated in the festival’s approach to programming.14 This ‘remain and reform’ position extends to a particular concern 12 13 14 Michael Hall: Music Theatre in Britain, 1960-1975, pp. 5-6. ‘Tête à Tête is the future of opera’, the website proclaims: ‘The opera revolution starts here’. See www.tete-a-tete.org.uk/about-us [last accessed 16.02.2019]. In an interview with the author, Bankes-Jones compared the reclaiming of ‘opera’ to that of the word ‘queer’, and suggested that if an artist ‘self-identifies’ as belonging at Tête à Tête, then they probably do belong there. 115 116 Thom Andrewes with issues of relevance, accessibility and participation in regard to both artists and audiences. By remaining within the opera discourse, there is a clear wish to lead by example. Yet Tête à Tête’s tenacious hold on the term ‘opera’ also reveals a desire to be integrated into the wider opera ecology, from the conservatoires all the way up to the major houses.15 Bankes-Jones originally intended the festival to be a seedbed for new work. At the time, a growing number of small companies were inviting friends to work-in-progress showings. The aim of the festival was to offer greater exposure to these projects, collect more extensive feedback and help them progress to the next stage. In addition, the festival hosts masterclasses and roundtables for operamakers, ‘speed-dating’ for potential collaborators, and publishes documentation of every production in what is now the largest online video archive of new opera.16 In their mission to stimulate the creation of new work, Tête à Tête are joined by another company, Second Movement, whose Rough for Opera initiative has provided opera-makers with a regular platform for work-in-progress showings since 2011. Composers or companies respond to an open call for 10-30 minutes of original, unperformed work, and three projects are chosen to be presented to a paying audience at the Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone. This is followed by an audience Q&A with the creators, usually led by the composer Paul Barker, whose Modern Music Theatre Troupe were stalwarts of the London scene in the 1990s. One of the intentions behind Rough for Opera is to improve the quality of new large-scale opera by giving it a chance to be tested in public and to allow audience feedback to shape the development process. This is supposed to bring transparency to the opera-making process, which absorbs a huge amount of public funds, as well as giving composers the chance to learn specific skills and take risks in a low-stakes environment. In spite of this, the opera ‘start-ups’ that Tête à Tête and Rough for Opera cultivate rarely develop into full-scale productions or even receive repeat performances. While composers may go on to receive commissions from one of London’s major houses – the Royal Opera House (ROH) and English National Opera – there is a desperate lack of ‘mid-scale’ structures, both in London and nationally, to bridge the gap between these venues and the fringe. This dynamic has affected the way in which the festival’s programming has evolved since 2007. Rather than ‘graduating’ from the festival as Bankes-Jones had initially intended, the same composers kept returning to pitch new ideas. The festival began to be seen not as a launchpad but 15 16 Bankes-Jones is currently Chair of the Opera and Music Theatre Forum (OMTF), a national network and lobbying organisation for small and mid-scale companies. Tête à Tête also coproduce a biennial programme of new operas with students at the Royal College of Music and host Improbable’s Devoted and Disgruntled, an open symposium on the state of opera and theatre. https://vimeo.com/teteateteopera. In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes as an end point: the lack of space, time and money no longer signified provisionality, but came to suggest creative constraints. Thus, among the annual turnover of young teams producing their first operas, there is a solid group of returning artists – often mid- or late-career – who have tailored their aesthetics to the limitations presented by the festival. One such artist is composer-director Catherine Kontz, who has made work for nearly every Tête à Tête edition since opening the very first festival. Her contributions have included operatic ‘happenings’ and ‘flashmobs’ involving the audience in playful situations that require minimal rehearsal. Kontz’s approach to composition exhibits qualities of both extreme control and extreme freedom. She has directed her own productions, including her ‘mime opera’ MiE (2006), and produced scores that stipulate the performers’ movement quite precisely. However, she is also inspired by London’s free music scene, and pieces like Snakes and Ladders (2018), based on the classic board game, allow performers to play freely within rule-based parameters. Another artist whose work appears almost every year at Tête à Tête is Ergo Phizmiz (AKA Dominic Robertson). A prolific composer of experimental pop music and radio plays, Phizmiz applies avant-garde collage techniques to contemporary mass culture. His first Tête à Tête appearance followed a commission by De Player, Rotterdam, to restage one of the many operas he composed as a child. Finding that all the scores had been lost, he produced a new piece – The Mourning Show (2010) – which introduced a live dimension into his anarchic radiophonic work. His subsequent operas have tended to involve a pre-constructed sound score, with an ensemble – often including Phizmiz himself, friends and family – half-improvising their vocal parts, adding their own ‘ornaments’ and navigating ‘obstructions’ that Phizmiz throws into the mix. The live performances add an element of freedom to the composer’s dense audio, video and literary assemblages, which combine chewed-up and regurgitated pop references with borrowings from the history of opera and twentieth-century art. Like other regular Tête à Tête artists, Phizmiz has found himself victim to a vicious spiral of defunding: by adapting his work to accommodate a lack of resources, he appears not to need the funding that prospective supporters then feel justified in denying him. However, he did have the chance to apply his collage-composition method on a grander scale in Mozart vs Machine (2017), produced by one of London’s few remaining mid-scale contemporary opera companies, Mahogany Opera Group. Formed in 2014 by Frederic Wake-Walker – from a merger between his company, Mahogany Opera, and John Fulljames’s The Opera Group – Mahogany Opera Group offers a case study in the difficulties currently facing new opera creation and the solutions being proposed. After several years continuing the valuable work of its parent companies in producing and touring new mid-scale opera and music theatre, the company was awarded structural funding from the Arts Council (so- 117 118 Thom Andrewes called ‘NPO status’), but was then forced to give up this funding, due to the ‘pressures and risks’ involved in adapting their production and touring model to the requirements of the NPO framework.17 After a period of crisis, the company has relaunched as Mahogany Opera, with a streamlined strategic plan focusing equally on an education programme (Snappy Operas), a deliberately super-flexible touring concept entitled Metamorphosis and their own work-in-progress festival: Various Stages. Mahogany Opera’s shift away from full-scale new productions has widened an existing chasm in London’s new opera infrastructure left by various organisations since the 1990s. The most influential of these was Almeida Opera, based at the Almeida Theatre, but they also included BAC Opera, Opera Factory London, the London International Opera Festival, the ROH’s ROH2 programme, and the ICA’s theatre and new music programmes. On one side of this chasm are the major houses, which still commission new work for partner venues like the Barbican or the Lyric Hammersmith, or for the ROH’s Linbury Theatre.18 However, these are large-scale projects involving a great deal of financial and reputational risk, especially given the recurrent eruptions of public hostility towards the state support of opera as a ‘posh’ and ‘elitist’ pastime.19 On the other side, there has been a huge proliferation of small companies making work at Tête à Tête and other small-scale platforms (e.g. Grimeborn at the Arcola or Opera in the City at Bridewell Theatre), and in unconventional locations, driven as much by the scarcity of available stages as by a spirit of innovation. The growing disconnect between opera and theatre institutions has made it hard for companies to secure the rehearsal space and financial support necessary to investigate more sophisticated staging approaches or new methods of devising work. Whereas London has a wealth of performers adept at sight-reading and interpreting complex scores convincingly, performances at this scale are very often delivered from a score or with the most rudimentary of stagings. As a result, the odd new mid-scale productions tend to be one-off projects commissioned and co-produced by established instrumental ensembles (e.g. London Sinfonietta) and festivals (e.g. 17 18 19 For more details, see Mahogany Opera, ‘Mahogany Opera Business Plan, April 2019 – March 2022’. Available at www.mahoganyopera.co.uk/assets/files/Mahogany%20Opera%20Business%20Plan%20Apr%2019%20-%20Mar%2022%20FINAL%20080519.pdf [last accessed 13.10.2019]. This document is particularly candid about the role of the company’s work-inprogress showcases in ‘[mitigating] against artistic and financial risk’ (p. 15). One recent innovation in the ROH’s new opera commissioning has been its partnership with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama on a doctoral composer-in-residence programme, which has produced works such as Philip Venables’ 4.48 Psychosis (2016) and Na’ama Zisser’s Mamzer Bastard (2018). See e.g. Singh, Anita: ‘Too Posh for Pop? Arts Council “Must Give Less Money to Elitist Opera”, Says UK Music Boss’, in The Telegraph, 09.04.2018. In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes Spitalfields Festival), often in concert hall formats or as site-responsive projects, to add variety to a more conventional core programme.20 One of the few currently functioning models for creating interdisciplinary composer-led projects is that of independent producing organisations like Third Ear, Artangel, Forma, Sound UK and Thirty Three Thirty Three, who are able to build up networks of partners across disciplinary divides, tap multiple funding streams and shoulder some of the overheads and financial risk facing independent artists. These companies tend to curate and develop work on a project-by-project basis, cultivating their own artistic identities through their portfolios, rather than managing a roster of standalone artists. They are often able to counteract the inadequacies of the UK’s support structures by brokering international relationships, which open up new funding avenues and touring networks; for example, Third Ear’s collaboration with Yuval Avital, Fuga Perpetua (2016), involved partners from the UK, Israel, Canada, Italy and Kenya.21 As a London-based artist with a strong affinity to the European and North American music theatre scenes, the work of director Patrick Eakin Young offers some insight into the obstacles affecting experimental approaches in the UK.22 Eakin Young’s early productions –with ERRATICA, the company he founded in 2007 – focused on experimental stagings of Baroque and contemporary music, juxtaposing raw and technologically mediated voices and bodies. However, since 2015, he has tended to commission original scores for his live productions and multimedia installations, which are often composed collaboratively using borrowed musical and literary materials. As ERRATICA’s sole permanent artistic member (and, since the company’s dissolution in 2019, as a solo artist), Eakin Young’s approach to collaborative creation has passed through a series of evolutions. Triptych (2014) was the result of an attempt to establish a permanent company of singers, trained in physical theatre and group improvisation, who would devise new opera in workshops with guest composers and librettists as part of a method called Body/Opera, adapted from Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s Viewpoints technique. This method proved untenable, and more recent projects have involved the director assembling an artistic team and 20 21 22 Recent examples might include Tansy Davies’s Cave (2018), presented by the Sinfonietta at a former printworks in Rotherhithe, or Schumann Street (2017), a series of cross-genre, sitespecific performances of Dichterliebe, staged throughout eight historic Huguenot houses in Spitalfields. It is worth noting that several of the most distinctive and influential British exponents of new music theatre have built up their careers outside of the UK. This includes artists as diverse as Katie Mitchell, Benedict Mason, Kaffe Matthews, The Tiger Lillies and Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion. I am acutely aware of these obstacles, having worked with Eakin Young in various associate capacities since 2012. 119 120 Thom Andrewes inventing a collaboration method for each new project, playing a role somewhere between facilitator and auteur. Working with sizeable teams over prolonged creation periods, Eakin Young’s ambitions have been sustained by a relationship with Notting Hill’s independent Coronet Theatre (formerly The Print Room), as well as international partnerships and forays into dance and visual art institutions. Pieces like Remnants (2017) layer discrete elements – text, music, movement and spectacle – in order to produce unexpected associations and a cumulative emotional effect. This ‘polyphonic’ aesthetic allows collaborators to maintain a certain degree of autonomy within a process designed to enable the director to ‘compose’ music theatre, despite having no formal musical training. In this way, his work fits the concept of ‘composed theatre’ much more closely than most of his British peers.23 Figure 2: ERRATICA’s’ Remnants’ (2017) at the Coronet Credit: Richard Hubert Smith Indeed, it was Eakin Young’s encounter with a wider European scene (at the Operadagen festival) that encouraged him to begin referring to his work as ‘music theatre’ rather than ‘opera’.24 This has fed into a more sustained attempt on his part to popularise the term in the UK, as a way to situate British work within a more 23 24 See Rebstock, Matthias/Roesner, David (eds): Composed Theatre. Aesthetics, Practices, Processes, Bristol: Intellect 2012. His company was originally called Opera Erratica, rebranded as ERRATICA in 2015. In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes international context and link British artists to potential producers, presenters and artistic peers abroad. The initiative that he went on to establish – New British Music Theatre (NBMT) – began as an artist-exchange programme designed to bring a cohort of British artists to the 2016 Music Theatre Now meeting in Rotterdam. Since then, NBMT has become a collective of artists pooling knowledge and opportunities to co-promote their work internationally and to encourage a wider recognition of the new music theatre sector within the UK. Battersea Arts Centre, ‘gig theatre’ and the alternative theatre scene Alongside ERRATICA, the original cohort of NBMT artists included London-based theatre companies Little Bulb Theatre, 1927 and Clod Ensemble.25 All three of these companies have developed work at Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), one of London’s most important venues for experimental theatre since its establishment in Battersea’s old town hall building in 1979. BAC’s opera festival was a key platform for new music theatre in the late 1990s: Clod Ensemble were mainstays, alongside contemporaries like the gogmagogs, the Shout and Tête à Tête. The venue still plays a crucial role in the city’s new music theatre landscape and yet its approach to programming new music theatre changed quite abruptly when former artistic director Tom Morris was replaced by David Jubb in 2004, around the same time that the Almeida’s policy on new opera also began to shift. It is worth comparing BAC’s programming trajectory with that of the Almeida. In each case, a move away from modern composition both reflected and reinforced a widening aesthetic gap between new opera and new theatre in London. When Michael Attenborough – then artistic director of the Almeida – finally sealed the fate of Almeida Opera in 2012, he did so in no uncertain terms: ‘I felt no artistic kinship with the opera festival […] Modern opera studiously avoids anything so oldfashioned as melody or emotion, which seems to me a contradiction of what music is all about.’26 The Almeida now focuses on literary theatre, alongside the odd musical. In contrast, BAC continues to support music theatre projects, albeit with a significant pivot towards pop music styles and formats. In this case, it seems to have as much 25 26 The other original NBMT artists were KILN, KlangHaus, Lady Vendredi/MAS Productions, Jimmy Merris, Jenny Minton, Verity Standen and Melanie Wilson. In 2019, a new cohort of emerging artists were selected to represent NBMT at Music Theatre Now: The Belfast Ensemble, BitterSuite, Bourgeois & Maurice, Jane Dickson, Laura Moody and Conrad Murray. Walker, Tim: ‘Theatre Director Michael Attenborough is no Fan of Modern Opera’, in The Telegraph, 02.08.2018. This decision may or may not have been influenced by the 33 percent cut in the theatre’s funding, following the coalition government’s huge cuts to the arts in 2010; see Jen Harvie: Fair Play. Art, Performance and Neoliberalism, p. 155. 121 122 Thom Andrewes to do with an ascendant idea about how theatre – and art in general – should relate to its audience, as it does with a conservative turn towards ‘old-fashioned’ musical expressivity.27 This idea – which Daniel Schulze has discussed in terms of a renewed search for ‘authenticity’ and ‘the real’ in theatre – is the key to the distinction between musicals and what has been dubbed ‘gig theatre’.28 While present in many of London’s theatres and arts centres (the Albany, Camden People’s Theatre, the Gate, Jackson’s Lane, the New Diorama, Ovalhouse, the Roundhouse, Shoreditch Town Hall, Soho Theatre, VAULT Festival, the Yard, et al.), it is nowhere more pervasive than at BAC. Like most of these organisations, BAC receives a certain amount of structural funding from the Arts Council, supplemented by a mix of local authority support, project grants from charitable trusts and foundations, private donations and earned income from ticket sales and other enterprise.29 The organisation describes itself as a ‘development house’: it commissions a few shows annually and presents a certain volume of touring work developed elsewhere, but the vast majority of the building’s activity and ample space is given over to artists developing new work as part of its Scratch initiative. BAC coined the term ‘Scratch’ in 2000 to describe an approach to supporting new work that encourages a more transparent and reflexive devising process.30 Residencies are offered to artists to try out new ideas and the results are shared in public work-in-progress showings called Scratch Nights. Artists receive audience feedback in the form of questionnaires, as well as the chance to test material in a live setting. As both a process and a term, Scratch has become increasingly prevalent across the devised theatre world and beyond (as Rough for Opera demonstrates). Transparency, accountability and reflexivity also operate as aesthetic principles in much of BAC’s programming. The venue prioritises ‘work that feels live and that acknowledges the audience watching, that feels like it is happening in the 27 28 29 30 It is worth noting that there is no real equivalent to the German E- and U-Musik in the UK, especially not one that corresponds with genre. In addition, factors like the historical prominence of pop art and art-school bands, and the enduring influence of British cultural studies in academia (as opposed to the Frankfurt School), have guaranteed pop music’s place within the UK’s artistic establishment. See Schulze, Daniel: Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance. Make It Real, London: Methuen Drama, 2017. Schulze’s study focuses on genres such as immersive, documentary and one-to-one theatre, all popularised by BAC over the past decade. For the 2018-22 funding period, Arts Council England renewed its commitment to award BAC an annual grant of nearly £70,000 (which amounted to approximately a quarter of the organisation's total non-capital voluntary income in 2016-17): Battersea Arts Centre, ‘Report and Financial Statements for the Year Ended 31 March 2017’. See Battersea Arts Centre, ‘Scratch 15’. Available at artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/scratch-15/QQ2BJ49w [last accessed 16.02.2019]. In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes same room as the audience, that has a sense of event’.31 Performances often explore dialogical aesthetics, involve particular communities, tell real stories or fulfil some genuine social function. This growing emphasis on tangible audience engagement and social impact has come to redefine the arts centre’s entire purpose. In 2015, BAC dropped the word ‘theatre’ from its organisational mission: ‘to invent the future of theatre’ became ‘to inspire people to take creative risks to shape the future’.32 BAC’s turn towards community work and activism resonates with many of the aims of the original British fringe theatre movement post-1968.33 In order to engage new audiences and adapt their shows to alternative venues, many of these companies drew on folk theatre and popular music traditions, which allowed them to explore new performance styles while remaining entertaining and accessible. Some of the most successful recent shows to come out of BAC have used popular traditions to similar ends. For instance, 1927’s The Animals and Children Took to the Streets (2010), Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients (2012) and BAC Beatbox Academy’s Frankenstein (2018) all employ forms of musicalised storytelling – drawing on music hall patter, Berlin cabaret, Greek theatre or hip hop – that exist somewhere between narration and embodiment.34 The result is a destabilisation of both musical and theatrical representational conventions. In contrast, musician and theatre-maker Christopher Brett Bailey has used similar techniques to unsettle the primacy of narrative. Three of Bailey’s pieces were presented as a triple bill at BAC in 2018, under the title Are You Deaf Yet?. His breakthrough production, This Is How We Die (2014), sees the writer-performer sitting at a desk, delivering a surrealist monologue for the majority of the performance. The ranting, spiralling narrative is eventually overtaken by a heavy wave of guitar drones performed by a band that materialises from the darkness. In this way, the show dramatises the gradual collapse of meaning and language into pure 31 32 33 34 Battersea Arts Centre, ‘How Can Artists Work with Battersea Arts Centre’, p. 8. Available at www.bac.org.uk/resources/0000/3193/How_can_artists_work_with_Battersea_Arts_Centre.pdf [last accessed 17.02.2019]. I use ‘transparency’ here in the sense that it is used in corporations, NGOs or political organisations, whereby structures and processes (e.g. an artist’s motivations or their creation methods) are made fully visible and comprehensible to observers. The aforementioned document is itself testament to BAC’s commitment to transparency, in that it outlines the organisation’s programming policies and producing models in very generous detail. See www.bac.org.uk/content/37376/about/about_us [last accessed 16.02.2019]. See Craig, Sandy (ed.): Dreams and Deconstructions. Alternative Theatre in Britain, Ambergate: Amber Lane 1980. Performance vocabularies borrowed from hip hop and grime music can be particularly effective in cultivating an intensely virtuosic and embodied approach to storytelling, linking autobiographical narrative to the unique capabilities of the body (examples include Debris Stevenson’s Poet in da Corner, co-commissioned in 2018 by London’s bastion of new literary theatre, the Royal Court). 123 124 Thom Andrewes noise, which is the starting-point for Bailey’s follow-up show, Kissing the Shotgun Goodnight (2016): a long-form post-rock composition with barely any text. Staged in the shell of the previous show, this piece focuses instead on an abstract dramaturgy of blinding light and noise, and their physical effect on the audience. Thus, Bailey redeploys the affective tools of rock music as a route towards an Artaudian intensity of experience. Although he rejects the term, Bailey’s work could be described as ‘gig theatre’: a label that is becoming increasingly common among critics, programmers and artists alike.35 Gig theatre generally refers to theatrical pieces that double as real musical performances, in which the real performance situation of the gig synchronises with the theatrical logic of the show. This creates an effect of immediacy and authenticity that plays on the already ambivalent theatricality of live pop music. In gig theatre shows that maintain a degree of conventional mimesis, musical practices, actions and relationships (within an ensemble or band, for instance) are frequently used to explore social dynamics and the production of personal and group identities. The work of BAC regulars Little Bulb Theatre is an excellent illustration of this. Founded by a trio of devising performers (Alexander Scott, Clare Beresford and Dominic Conway) and bolstered by a pool of associate artists, the plots of Little Bulb shows often centre on amateur musicians. In Operation Greenfield (2010), the company played teenagers in a Christian rock band, while Sporadical (2009) was a ‘folk opera’ performed within the frame of a family reunion. In both cases, the fiction is embedded within a ‘real’ performance situation in which the audience are included. The effect of authenticity is reinforced by the company’s pragmatic approach to actor-musicianship. While they regularly pick up new instruments and are always developing their skills,36 they also devise shows that allow them to wear their imperfections on their sleeves. In recent years, gig theatre has infiltrated many of London’s most mainstream theatre institutions, from the Old Vic (David Greig and Charlie Fink’s Cover My Tracks, 2017) to the West End (Arinzé Kene’s Misty, 2018), and received a dedicated festival in 2016: All the Right Notes at Camden People’s Theatre. However, the trend is most conspicuous outside of London, with strong local scenes in Bristol and Glasgow. As a performance paradigm, gig theatre suggests certain devising and composition processes – both Little Bulb and Christopher Brett Bailey have used the band dynamic to compose collaboratively – as well as production strategies, 35 36 See e.g. Muggs, Joe: ‘Two Tribes. How the Theatre and Music Scenes are Mixing it up’, in The Guardian, 10.11.2016; and Williams, Holly: ‘Could Playwrights Save Pop Music? The Rise of “Gig Theatre”’, in The Telegraph, 01.06.2017. In preparation for Orpheus (2013), Scott learned the clarinet and Beresford the double bass from scratch, and the company played regularly at a local jazz bar in character as a 1930s gypsy jazz band. In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes Figure 3: Little Bulb Theatre’s ‘Operation Greenfield’ (2010) Credit: Little Bulb Theatre in that it gives theatre-makers access to pop music venues, rehearsal spaces and audiences.37 As with pop gigs, touring is often crucial to the feasibility of these productions. Therefore, in order to properly situate this work within its structural context, it is necessary to briefly expand the focus of this essay and give a broader description of the British theatre landscape, however cursory. Producing and touring alternative theatre: the national context While the UK’s theatre activity is disproportionately concentrated in London, the twentieth century saw several waves of regional repertory theatres and arts centres being constructed, primarily in major urban centres.38 Aside from the commer37 38 Paines Plough, nabokov and Bryony Kimmings have all presented gig theatre work at the Latitude outdoor music festival, sharing a bill with bands like the Killers and New Order. ‘Regional’ is a term that has (controversially) come to mean anywhere outside of London within certain British policy discourses. For a recent survey of the English theatre landscape, see BOP Consulting & Graham Devlin Associates, ‘Arts Council England. Analysis of Theatre 125 126 Thom Andrewes cial ‘receiving houses’, these can loosely be grouped into ‘producing houses’, which create new shows in-house, and ‘presenting houses’, which curate programmes of visiting companies (and occasionally commission new shows from these artists).39 Increasingly, venues are involved in both types of activity, as well as co-producing or co-commissioning work in partnership with other venues: a trend which leads to fewer new shows being made overall, although each show receives more performances. Most British theatres and arts centres rely on a mixture of commercial/charitable income and government subsidy from local authorities and the Arts Councils (or Creative Scotland, the equivalent public body for Scotland). For organisations in England, there are two main types of funding available from the Arts Council: oneoff project grants (funded through the National Lottery) and four-year structural grants, as part of the National Portfolio. National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) status is granted and renewed on the basis of a track record of artistic excellence, an agreement that funded activities and organisational policies will accord with the policy priorities of the Arts Council, and regular assessments to monitor the ongoing success of the agreed activity. As a result, this source of long-term structural funding is not available to young artists or new companies. A relationship with the Arts Council must be built up over time; organisations will usually have received a number of one-off project grants before being considered for NPO status. However, financing productions and tours with project grants can involve a good deal of risk on the part of both artists and venues. The awarding of grants is generally contingent upon offers of support from other sources (private and charitable income, venue and festival programming), but often these offers are themselves contingent upon public funding.40 Financial deals between visiting companies and venues will generally involve a split of ticket sales or a guarantee against loss, thus sharing out the risk involved in presenting experimental work. Even then, companies will usually have to convince programmers of the commercial appeal of their shows by identifying their target audiences. This can act as a barrier to performance styles that cannot be easily summarised or categorised. At the same time, emerging artists and small companies can benefit greatly from the in-kind support offered by publicly subsidised venues as part of their artist development activities. NPOs are generally obliged to offer such opportunities, along with education and 39 40 in England’, 13.09.2016. Available at https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Analysis%20of%20Theatre%20in%20England%20-%20Final%20Report.pdf [last accessed 15.10.2019]. While the regional producing houses are still known as repertory theatres, the UK now has barely any subsidised theatres with their own permanent full-time resident ensembles. For an excellent resource concerning small-scale touring in the UK, see Venues North, ‘Routes In. A Guide to Getting New Work Programmed in the North of England’. Available at https:// www.royalexchange.co.uk/661-routes-in/file [last accessed 16.10.2019]. In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes community engagement, as a way of redistributing some of their structural support to a more precarious stratum of independent artists. This tends to come in the form of space, knowledge and exposure –residencies, mentorships, associate opportunities, networking events – rather than money. One unique feature of the British theatre landscape is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which functions as a national and international showcase for independently produced shows that are in the final stages of development or have just been finished. For early-career artists, taking a show to Edinburgh is another form of speculation, as productions generally have to be self-financed and compete for audiences in a ridiculously crowded marketplace. Shows need to be very light and streamlined, generally less than an hour in length and able to get in and out daily. At the same time, it is an excellent opportunity to expose work to a concentrated group of presenters, producers and critics. By getting enough ‘buzz’ from Edinburgh, a new company or show can achieve a certain level of national recognition very quickly. For instance, Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee’s Jerry Springer: The Opera (2001), probably the most successful show to emerge from BAC’s Scratch process, was given its first fully staged production at the National Theatre on the basis of its success at the 2002 Edinburgh Festival. 1927’s The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients and BAC Beatbox Academy’s Frankenstein were presented at the 2011, 2013 and 2019 Festivals respectively, as part of the British Council’s biennial Edinburgh Showcase, which promotes experimental and devised shows to visiting international presenters. Little Bulb Theatre also benefitted hugely from early exposure at Edinburgh. Their debut show Crocosmia premiered at the 2008 Festival and won several awards and its follow-up Sporadical was then commissioned by the festival’s experimental Forest Fringe venue (which also hosted Christopher Brett Bailey’s This Is How We Die in 2014). Little Bulb have subsequently been commissioned by the Bristol Old Vic, Nuffield Southampton Theatres and BAC, but the company’s longevity has been guaranteed by their association with Farnham Maltings: an arts centre and producing organisation based in Farnham, Surrey (around 35 miles southwest of London). Farnham Maltings have pioneered a number of important initiatives to support the touring of small-scale alternative theatre. They work closely with a select group of independent companies and artists, providing different levels of production support, commissions, tour booking and residencies. Thus, they benefit from an economy of scale, leveraging their existing resources, contacts and expertise on the behalf of multiple artists.41 In addition, Farnham Maltings run caravan, a bi- 41 This model is shared by a number of other producing organisations including Fuel, China Plate and MAYK: all NPOs that support music-driven work and gig theatre. 127 128 Thom Andrewes ennial showcase of new work for international presenters at the Brighton Festival, and house, a venue network and touring initiative for the South East of England.42 The affinity between Farnham Maltings’ touring model and Little Bulb’s brand of gig theatre can be seen in shows like The Marvellous and Unlikely Fete of Little Upper Downing (2011) and Mountain Music (2019), commissioned and devised specifically for rural touring. Most of the pioneers of gig theatre in the UK seem to share this recognition of the genre’s mobility and flexibility; this includes veteran touring company Paines Plough, as well as their associates, the Hull-based Middle Child. Along with like-minded companies nabokov and Not Too Tame, Middle Child formed the Push Things Forward Collective in 2017: a reformist initiative that sees gig theatre formats as a route to more ‘relevant and popular’ forms of theatre.43 Further afield, the National Theatre of Scotland (established in 2006) has been one of the most consistent and high-profile proponents of the genre, which seems well suited to the company’s rejection of the venue-centric, ‘bricks-and-mortar’ model of a national producing house, in favour of maximum mobility: a ‘theatre without walls’. This cursory glance beyond the London scene is not meant to offer any kind of coherent portrait of gig theatre in the UK as a whole. It is merely intended to demonstrate that, within the alternative theatre framework, there is a functioning national touring infrastructure, however imperfect. Equivalent support structures and producing networks are conspicuously lacking for small companies and artistled projects in the contemporary opera field. Understandably, the major opera houses’ artist development programmes and higher education partnerships are primarily geared towards reproducing the numerous skills required in their own productions. It is true that the pressure on these institutions to run education and participation projects has created some opportunities for composers and young directors, while secondary strands of programming – like Opera North Projects – provide an occasional platform for visiting companies or artist-led projects; yet this hardly constitutes a touring circuit.44 Of the opportunities that do exist, the most important for the London context are those provided by Snape Maltings (formerly Aldeburgh Music): home to the Aldeburgh Festival and the institutional legacy of 42 43 44 An equivalent venue network, STAMP, was launched for London in 2017, although its activities are currently orientated towards sharing professional advice and opportunities with artists: https://www.stamplondon.org. https://www.nabokov-online.com/about-us One possible obstacle to the development of such a circuit from a London perspective is that the UK’s second-largest music theatre scene – that of Glasgow – is also one of the furthest away, not to mention the fact that it exists within a completely separate funding context (these may also be key reasons for the scene’s relative strength and coherence). The highly dedicated and prolific Glasgow-based music theatre company Cryptic has recently attempted to bridge this divide by touring its Sonica festival to London’s Kings Place. In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes Benjamin Britten. Faster Than Sound – an initiative run by Aldeburgh Music between 2006-2014 – was a significant generator of interdisciplinary music projects, even if these rarely received repeat performances. More recently, the organisation’s Open Space residencies and Festival of the New have provided yet another ‘seedbed’ for music theatre projects in their early stages: a valuable initiative that nevertheless fails to address the problem of where these projects go next. Composer-performer collectives and the experimental music scene In her Theatre Aurality, Lynne Kendrick links ‘gig theatre’ to the ‘gig economy’.45 It is ‘the “one-night-only” theatre event; the bare minimum of performance that is possible to muster in the current times of austerity’: ‘Like the gig economy, gig theatre is the result of precarity in the theatre industry, it is a phrase that articulates the problems that the gig format present to performers and programmers alike, but it is also a form of performance embraced by risky and radical theatre makers who are drawn to the possibilities that the oneoff event uniquely presents.’ The same conditions of neoliberalism and austerity, along with a desire to connect with new audiences in more immediate ways, underpin many of the developments in new music that I described in We Break Strings. The Alternative Classical Scene in London.46 Covering the period of 2004-2014, the book focuses on a growing community of composers, performers and curators making music outside of the physical and organisational institutions of new music. New artist-led organisational structures, indie record labels and event series were established in pubs, clubs and warehouses, and new aesthetics and performance practices were found to fit these contexts. The impetuses behind the movement include the ghettoisation of new music by the classical establishment, the alienation felt by certain potential audiences and the lack of opportunities being presented to the many composers and performers passing through London’s conservatoires. In response, these artists made their own opportunities. Punk and dance music culture provided a model for organisations like Nonclassical, with their DIY new music gigs in rock venues initially being financed through ticket and CD sales.47 The behind-the-scenes flexibility of the 45 46 47 Kendrick, Lynne: Theatre Aurality, London: Pallgrave Macmillan 2017, p. 48. Andrewes, Thom/Djuric, Dimitri: We Break Strings. The Alternative Classical Scene in London, London: Hackney Classical 2014. Similarly, Robert Barry described London’s contemporary classical scene in 2017 as ‘experiencing its punk rock moment’. Barry, Robert: ‘This Is a Score. This Is Another. This Is a Third. Now Form a Band’, August 2017. Available at www.soundslikenow.net/this-is-a-score-this-isanother-this-is-a-third-now-form-a-band [last accessed 15.02.2019]. 129 130 Thom Andrewes entrepreneurial performer-composer-curator-promoters who produced the events rivalled the virtuosity onstage. At the same time, they benefitted from a pre-existing infrastructure, audience and performance culture in the form of London’s free improvisation scene. From the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and AMM in the 1960s, via the Scratch Orchestra, London Musicians Collective (LMC) and London Improvisers Orchestra, the radical activities of several generations of experimental performers and composers has made London a fertile ground for DIY musical activity.48 The material legacy produced by this scene – venues like Café OTO, IKLECTIK and Vortex, The Wire magazine (based in Hackney) and art-radio station Resonance FM (one of the last projects of the LMC) – continues to be accessed and exploited by composers and improvising musicians alike. Free music veterans remain highly active, attracting and inspiring new generations of improvisers to swell London’s ‘reserve army’ of musicians adapted to a flexible, ‘just-in-time’ approach to musical production. This has helped sustain a relatively spontaneous, de-professionalised musical culture, along with the relevance of the aesthetic legacy of figures like Cornelius Cardew and Michael Parsons: the Anglo-American tradition defined in Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music. Cage and Beyond.49 A key feature of this DIY milieu has been composer collectives organising their own events to showcase their compositions alongside those of like-minded peers. Many of these composers also perform their own or each other’s work. This is a direct result of a lack of rehearsal space and money to pay performers; yet it also feeds into a renewed compositional focus on the ‘theatrical’ or ‘performative’ dimensions of musical performance. There are at least three factors relating to this performative turn. Firstly, these composer-performers are rarely virtuoso performers; they compose for their own capacities, often using physical gestures, everyday tasks or the risk of failure as materials. Secondly, curating concerts outside of institutional structures makes it easier to present music alongside performances from other disciplines (e.g. dance and performance art), as well as work that does not clearly fall within any genre. Thirdly, performing work outside of the concert hall – a format that both imposes and makes invisible a set of presentational conventions – allows compositions to acknowledge their own ‘stagedness’ within a specific social and architectural context. These factors have coincided with a widespread resurgence of interest in the situated body in new music, as encapsulated by the composer-performer Jennifer 48 49 See Barre, Trevor: Beyond Jazz. Plink, Plonk and Scratch, London: Improvmusic 2015. Nyman, Michael: Experimental Music. Cage and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999. Nevertheless, the influence of European music theatre was still an important feature of the alternative scene; for instance, the Kammer Klang series at Café OTO was run and curated by percussionist Serge Vuille, founder of We Spoke, a Swiss ensemble specialising in theatrical chamber concerts, who performed there frequently. In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes Walshe in her 2016 essay on ‘The New Discipline’.50 For Walshe, the New Discipline is not an aesthetic but rather a way of working. It involves the application of compositional rigour and physical discipline to an expanded field of potential materials and media, which in turn locates the body and persona of the composer/performer within a thick socio-politico-material context. The New Discipline attempts to transcend the division between musical performance and ‘music theatre’, by demonstrating the inherent theatricality of all live music. As an update on previous concepts of music theatre, it resonates with recent theories of performance as a post-postmodern aesthetic paradigm (Eshelman) and as a technique of social control (McKenzie).51 Indeed, the coercive biopolitics that link performance and discipline are fundamental to Walshe’s concept, which she characterises as a paradoxical pursuit of rigour while ‘always, always, working against the clock’.52 As in her own work, the results veer from an uncanny virtuosity to precarity, bathos and spectacles of failure. Walshe’s own presence on the London scene, along with like-minded composers like Tim Parkinson, James Saunders and Matthew Shlomowitz, has had a major influence on the emerging generation of composer-performer collectives. Bastard Assignments (Timothy Cape, Edward Henderson, Caitlin Rowley and Josh Spear) started out by organising their own events in found spaces and friends’ living rooms. They would each write and perform a new piece for every event, which included text scores, guided listening exercises and process-based music responding to the performance environment. More recently, the group has developed a shared creative practice inspired by methods encountered in Walshe and David Helbich’s composer-performer workshops at Darmstadt. The composers give extensive feedback on each other’s pieces in formal sharing sessions, in which they present works-in-progress and talk through ideas. As well as performing their own work, they write pieces for each other and for the ensemble as a whole. Increasingly, Bastard Assignments are moving towards a performance ensemble model, training in dance, improvisation and physical theatre, and commissioning pieces from international fellow travellers – e.g. Marcela Lucatelli and mocrep – who they then host at their events. 50 51 52 Walshe, Jennifer: ‘The New Discipline’. Available at www.borealisfestival.no/2016/the-newdiscipline-4 [last accessed 15.02.2019]. In 2016, Walshe co-edited an issue of MusikTexte dedicated to the topic of the New Discipline, featuring contributions from several of the composers discussed here: MusikTexte 149 (May 2016). See also Shlomowitz, Matthew: ‘Where Are We Now?’, in Tempo, 72.285 (2018), pp. 70–73. Eshelman, Raoul: ‘Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism’, in Anthropoetics: The Electronic Journal of Generative Anthropology 6.2 (2001); McKenzie, Jon: Perform or Else. From Discipline to Performance, London: Routledge, 2001. Jennifer Walshe: ‘The New Discipline’. 131 132 Thom Andrewes Figure 4: Bastard Assignments perform Marcela Lucatelli’s ‚Impossible Penetrations’ (2018) at Total Refreshment Centre Credit: Dimitri Djuric The composer-curators behind the performance series Weisslich (Michael Baldwin, Louis d’Heudieres and David Pocknee) followed a similar model, writing new pieces to perform alongside Fluxus scores and contemporary pieces by peers such as Andy Ingamells, Eleanor Cully and Antonia Barnett-McIntosh. Between 2014 and 2017, Weisslich produced ten events, including a mini-tour with US artists Ensemble Pamplemousse and Robert Blatt. Most of the events took place at Hoxton’s Hundred Years Gallery; the curators would present musical works alongside performance art and dance, and explore the connections in a series of online essays. The composer-performer collective squib-box is harder to characterise. It was founded in 2010 by Adam de la Cour, Neil Luck and Federico Reuben: three composers who share a Dadaesque irreverence and disdain for genre boundaries. squib-box record and release albums on their net-label and collaborate on anarchic one-off happenings.53 These tend to involve the composers bringing their own pre-prepared scripts, scores and visual materials, along with a bag of props and costumes, and combining these elements live on the night. 53 Cf. www.squib-box.com/netlabel/ In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes Luck is also the director of ARCO: a music theatre company and string ensemble that began in 2008 as a composer-performer workshop. Since then, the ensemble has focused on developing and performing new work by Luck, who prepares parts for the specific skills of the core performers, often leaving space for improvisation or task-based elements. One of the few groups that describe their work as ‘music theatre’, ARCO share many of the concerns of the early Manchester School, including ritual, violence and children’s games. At the same time, both ARCO and squibbox share a hyperactive, facetious attitude towards borrowing from both ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, emulating YouTube and meme culture while feeding back into it via video edits and films. All of these composer-performers share platforms, collaborators and audiences; yet their work also displays a broad variety of dramaturgical approaches, especially in terms of the relationship between the composer-persona, the performing body and the score. In d’Heudieres’s Laughter Studies series (2015-), performers listen to sounds played through headphones, which they must then describe or imitate live. The presence of the headphones allows even a non-trained audience to intuit a relationship between composer and performer, and to reconstruct an idea of ‘the score’, glimpsed through the performers’ spontaneous mediation. Similarly, in Rowley’s Community of Objects (2017), the score takes the form of a series of paper boxes, containing further materials and instructions, which are opened for the first time and subsequently destroyed during the course of the piece. The dramaturgy and resulting sound-world of the piece is thus characterised by the unfolding of a genuine curiosity. Other pieces by Bastard Assignments lack this staged power dynamic between composer and performer as manifested in the score. Instead, they begin with everyday activities and individual physical capacities, and the ‘musicalisation’ of these through processes of abstraction and repetition. ARCO’s work is different again, occupying a heightened ritual space in which virtuosic musicianship and compositional techniques become a kind of ‘magic’ surplus, evidence of the supernatural efficacy of seemingly pointless actions. Indeed, Luck and his collaborators regularly draw on the performativity of stage magic, as well as other popular or ‘showbiz’ genres like gameshows, the circus and commercial radio. The perceived dramaturgical logic of a given performance, and the meanings this produces, is partly determined by the disciplinary context in which it is presented. ARCO have received much of their support from the visual art world, including a series of commissions from Tate, while all these groups have worked with choreographers and presented dance as part of their events. Bastard Assignments (who met at Trinity Laban, a combined music and dance conservatoire) have even commissioned choreography for the group to perform, from lip-syncing dance duo Thick and Tight. Nevertheless, while the occasional guest artist manages to draw 133 134 Thom Andrewes punters from across the disciplinary divide, these groups are all still situated firmly within the new music milieu. This is not the case for another performer-curator collective, some of whom also met at Trinity Laban. London Topophobia is co-run by composer Jamie Hamilton, visual artist Charlie Hope, choreographer Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, dancer Dom Czapski and musician Paddy Austin of post-punk band Snapped Ankles. It began as a way to make the most of the huge East London warehouse in which Hamilton and Hope were living at the time. The curatorial team would create new work for each event, programmed alongside performances by friends and friends of friends. Having 24/7 access to the space allowed them to build high-tech installations and construct multiple stages, as well as rehearse and collaborate on cross-disciplinary projects. The series quickly built up a regular audience and achieved cult status: at its peak, the event attracted an audience of around a thousand, with people breaking windows in an attempt to get in and the venue being raided by the fire brigade. Event series like Topophobia recall the interdisciplinary format of the performance salon or cabaret. Some organisations have taken this influence even further, reimagining the cabaret format with experimental music at its heart. Rational Rec, which ran from 2005 to 2008 at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, was corun by Matthew Shlomowitz, alongside live art curator Cecilia Wee and artist Russell Martin. New and classic experimental works, performed by resident ensemble Plus-Minus, were woven into themed, participatory programmes inspired by the venue’s tradition of working-class entertainment: karaoke, quiz nights, film nights, group singalongs. More recently, Waste Paper Opera Company have presented their regular Whole Punch nights at the Rosemary Branch Theatre, with acts and skits by opera singers, improvisers, clowns and mime artists, compèred by ‘former 1980s game show host and F-list pop star’ Clint (alter-ego of Waste Paper’s founder and composer James Oldham). These events culminated in the first London Experimental Variety Show at the Shaw Theatre in 2019.54 Rising rents, noise ordinances and the privatisation of public space make this kind of DIY activity ever more difficult. After being evicted from their warehouse, Topophobia moved from venue to venue. The series has yet to secure Arts Council funding and has always relied on ticket and drinks sales and the goodwill of guest performers. With London’s warehouse venues depleting, the collective has found it difficult to find affordable performance spaces. For other groups, this increasing 54 Elsewhere, composers such as Philip Venables, Benjamin Tassie, Lola de la Mata and Josh Spear have found inspiration and collaborators in London’s queer cabaret and drag scenes, while the work of lip-sync artist Dickie Beau often comes close to post-dramatic music theatre (e.g. Camera Lucida at the Barbican, 2014). In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes Figure 5: Andy Ingamells performs ‘Bowmanship’ (2015) at Weisslich 3 Credit: Dimitri Djuric precarity has been offset by greater recognition and support from new music institutions and funders, including the Arts Council and the BBC.55 In 2013, Sound and Music – the ‘national charity for new music’– established its composer-curator scheme, specifically aimed at supporting entrepreneurial composers wanting to produce and programme their own events. In 2017, Bastard Assignments were accepted onto Snape Maltings’ residency scheme, which allowed them to develop and present a new concert programme, record an album, attend masterclasses and 55 There was even a concert dedicated to composer-performers as part of the 2019 BBC Proms programme, presented at BAC and featuring both Neil Luck and Jennifer Walshe. 135 136 Thom Andrewes tour internationally. Many composers also rely on academia to sustain their practice without too many of the compromises required of jobbing composers.56 In professional terms, the turn towards composing for a particular body or performance situation has its pros as well as its cons. On the one hand, composers become the sole specialists in their own work, monopolising touring opportunities and performance fees, which might offset the lack of income from publishing or licensing scores. On the other hand, many of these pieces – especially those that involve spontaneity or site-specificity – have an in-built obsolescence, which limits their re-performance.57 London Contemporary Music Festival and the visual art scene While the parallel proliferation of gig theatre and composer-performer collectives exists within two very different aesthetic histories, in both cases it involves a greater concentration on the individual body of the creator-performer. This body is unique in three different respects: as a ‘real person’ with a personal history; as a socio-cultural construct at the intersection of discursive and disciplinary apparatuses; and as a material, tangible object or assemblage. This shift in focus brings the performativity of the music theatre performer closer to that of the pop musician, but it also reconfigures the musician as performance artist. The London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF) is at the forefront of this reconfiguration of live music as performance art.58 Founded in 2013 by four curatormusicians central to the alternative classical scene (Sam Mackay, Aisha Orazbayeva, 56 57 58 Perhaps even more so than the conservatoires, university music faculties are crucial to the UK’s experimental music and music theatre landscape. In London, key institutions include Goldsmiths College, Brunel University and City University. Further afield, the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (part of Birmingham City University) recently launched a degree programme in Experimental Performance: effectively a performance art course provided by a music faculty. Other significant research initiatives include the Centre for Audio Visual Experimentation (CAVE) at Leeds and the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre at Sussex. The importance of academic institutions in British music theatre has several historic precedents; see, for example, the very different examples of Morley College (Cornelius Cardew/Nicola LeFanu) and the University of York (Wilfred Mellers/Roger Marsh) in the 1970s (Michael Hall: Music Theatre in Britain, 1960-1975, pp. 168-178, 253-274). Cf. Rutherford-Johnson, Tim: Music after the Fall. Music Composition and Culture since 1989, Oakland: University of California Press, 2017, pp. 136-139; also Sanne Krogh Groth: ‘Composers on Stage: Ambiguous Authorship in Contemporary Music Performance’, in Contemporary Music Review 35.6 (2016), pp. 686-705. As well as provocatively framing all of the items on its multi-disciplinary programmes as ‘music’, the festival’s name also echoes that of England’s other major new music festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (HCMF), where composer-performers and theatrical concerts are increasingly well-represented. In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes Lucy Railton and Igor Toronyi-Lalic), the festival is now run by Toronyi-Lalic, in partnership with conductor Jack Sheen, and curators Irene Altaió and Inês Geraldes Cardoso. Since the first edition, which brought eight free concerts of chamber, electronic and orchestral music to a repurposed car park in Peckham, the festival has combined audacious ambition with a DIY commitment on the part of the organisers. LCMF initially attempted to fund itself through a combination of private loans and corporate sponsorship, in a bid to avoid the prescriptions and provisos attached to Arts Council funding.59 Early editions found venues to match the scale of their vision among London’s stock of ex-industrial buildings earmarked by venture capitalists or social enterprises for development as hip cultural destinations. However, LCMF has since settled in Ambika P3 – a vast concrete exhibition space owned by the University of Westminster – and made peace with the need to pursue public funding. The festival presents recent and newly commissioned compositions alongside a mixture of video and performance art, improvised music and electronic music from both electroacoustic and techno traditions. This approach to programming is partly a strategic attempt to attract as many different audiences to each event as possible; usually each programme will contain some ‘headline’ item – a rare appearance or world premiere from a legendary composer or artist. At the same time, Toronyi-Lalic, Altaió and Geraldes Cardoso all have backgrounds in visual art, and LCMF borrows specific tactics from fine art curation, which in turn influence the ways in which the live music is received. Concerts are constructed around themed programmes, with titles such as ‘The New Intimacy’, ‘The Japanese Extreme’ and ‘Structural Faults’. Within these programmes, no differentiation is made between genre or medium; ‘musical’ and ‘non-musical’ performances are free to converse with one another. This in turn foregrounds their shared concerns: time, structure, action and presence. While the festival’s scope is international, it draws heavily on the London scene. The programme frequently relies on the expertise of players from London’s experimental ensembles: Apartment House, Plus-Minus and Sheen’s own group, An assembly. Bastard Assignments, Topophobia and squib-box have all performed at LCMF. Yet the festival’s curatorial approach positions these artists within particular genealogies, programming them alongside veteran British experimentalists like Gavin Bryars and Maggie Nicols; West Coast legends like Morton Subotnick and Pauline Oliveros; Judson Dance Theater artists like Philip Corner and Yvonne Rainer; and other forebears from the interstices between music and performance art, such as Andrew Poppy, Chris Newman and the Bow Gamelan Ensemble. One of the effects of programming ‘classic’ work by this older generation of artists is that, while highlighting the many historical confluences between contemporary music 59 LCMF 2015 was supported largely by the fashion brand COS. 137 138 Thom Andrewes and performance art, it actually reframes performance art as music, by treating it as reproducible. This effect is augmented by the ‘exhibiting’ of each performance in its own customised stage configuration, spread across the enormous venue. The audience is led between stages by light and sound, in a manner that recalls both promenade theatre and an exhibition tour.60 While Toronyi-Lalic rejects the term ‘theatre’ due to its lingering logocentrism (particularly in the UK), one of his most consistent curatorial projects has been the rehabilitation of ‘opera’.61 The first concert of the first LCMF was titled ‘To a New Definition of Opera’: it featured extracts from Einstein on the Beach and Laurie Anderson’s United States, as well as work by visual artist Ed Atkins and by Jennifer Walshe, who also performed Schwitters’ Ur-Sonate. A second ‘To a New Definition of Opera’ concert in 2015 included Tim Parkinson’s Time with People (2013) alongside Stockhausen and a screening of video artist Ryan Trecartin’s CENTER JENNY (2013). For Toronyi-Lalic, this is the same ‘new definition’ of opera that has led to the term being increasingly employed by visual artists to describe performances in galleries.62 ‘Operas’ have appeared in the live programmes of the Tate, David Roberts Art Foundation, Zabludowicz Collection and the Serpentine Galleries (partners of LCMF since 2018), as well as at Block Universe and the Frieze Art Fair.63 Some work, like that of Edwin Burdis or Anat Ben-David, plays on the etymology of the term, figuring ‘opera’ as an excessively grand or multifaceted project whose production is then deconstructed; Martin Creed and Janice Kerbel have likewise both positioned live music as ‘artwork’ within the aesthetic economy of the artist and art object. In other cases, as in the operas of Lina Lapelytė or the performances of Cara Tolmie, artist and art object are combined in the form of singing bodies, often female and/or queer, whose vocal presence complicates their relationship with the spectator.64 Similarly, artist and musician Jenny Moore uses congregated voices to explore the political dynamics of individual and group identity, homogeneity and difference, with her Mystic Business choral collective. 60 61 62 63 64 See Andrewes, Thom: ‘Live Review: London Contemporary Music Festival 2018 @ Ambika P3’, January 2019. Available at www.thebitingpoint.wordpress.com/2019/01/20/live-reviewlondon-contemporary-music-festival-2018-ambika-p3 [last accessed 15.02.2019]. Interview with the author (16.11.2018). Despite not using the term, LCMF has presented plenty of repertoire that would elsewhere be called ‘music theatre’, e.g. Dieter Schnebel, Alwynne Pritchard and Stockhausen’sHimmels-Tür. See Toronyi-Lalic, Igor: ‘Why We Should Say Farewell to the ENO’, in The Spectator, 07.02.2015. As part of the gradual reinstatement of their performance programme, controversially dropped in 2008, the ICA have staged new ‘operas’ and ‘musicals’ by experimental pop artists Mica Levi, Dean Blunt and Kle This was a key motif of The Voice and the Lens (curated by Sam Belinfante and Third Ear’s Ed McKeon), an exhibition that brought many of these artists to the Whitechapel Gallery as part of the 2014 Spitalfields Festival. In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes Figure 6: Musarc performing Joseph Kohlmaier and Claudia Molitor’s ‘Die Gedanken Sind Frei’ at Ambika P3 for the London Contemporary Music Festival 2018 Credit: Yiannis Katsaris Since 2018, LCMF has hosted concerts curated and performed by another choral collective, who have appeared in numerous ‘gallery operas’: Musarc. Founded in 2008 by Joseph Kohlmaier, a lecturer at the Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design, and music director Cathy Heller Jones, Musarc reimagines the amateur choir as an institution, tool and guinea pig for interdisciplinary experimentation. Alongside rehearsing traditional repertoire and ‘classics’ of late twentieth-century experimentalism, they commission new pieces that make full use of the ensemble’s idiosyncrasies (including by resident composers Sam Belinfante, Steve Potter and Kohlmaier himself). Affordable and eager to try anything, Musarc have become the go-to ensemble for visual artists looking to explore the choral or operatic form. They also curate and produce their own seasonal concerts and festivals: e.g. Odrathek (2018) – ‘a non-stop happening of performances, parliaments, installations, screenings, workshops and eating together’ – themed around Donna Haraway’s concept of the Cthulucene.65 Such curatorial frames can encourage ways of seeing, listening to and interpreting live musical performance that bring it into the sphere of visual art dis65 www.odrathek.org/information [last accessed 17.02.2019]. 139 140 Thom Andrewes course: relational aesthetics, the politics of self-representation, and the artist’s body as a sculptural medium. However, experimental performance in the UK far exceeds the boundaries of the visual art world and its regimes of perception. To fully situate music theatre within this landscape, we must refocus our attention on the discourse of ‘Live Art’. Music theatre and Live Art Since the 1980s, the term ‘Live Art’ has referred to an increasingly concrete area of artistic activity in the UK, located somewhere at the intersection of the visual art, cabaret and theatre worlds.66 While incorporating gallery performance and body art genealogies, it is also the direct heir to a certain strain of British experimental theatre; indeed, Live Art has been characterised in terms of a desire to ‘break’ theatre, while, for Lara Shalson, theatre is ‘something that is endured by and that endures within Live Art’.67 It is my suggestion that the Live Art paradigm allows us to look at gig theatre, composer-performer and gallery opera together. On the one hand, they all use music to ‘break’ either theatrical mimesis or the performance of everyday reality; on the other hand, the music helps hold these broken pieces together. Music thus plays a role in the cognitive act of ‘reconstructing’ these pieces into some meaningful ‘whole’, on the part of an active audience, which according to Wolfgang Funk is one of the ways in which an effect of authenticity can be produced.68 While there is not space here to fully explore this proposed conceptualisation, I want to conclude with three examples of artists who seem to offer models for a ‘Live Art opera’. All three are familiar faces at LCMF and travellers between London’s various music theatre scenes. Mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg is one of the few artists to have appeared at Tête à Tête, BAC and LCMF. Lixenberg’s varied career has seen her performing with Complicité, directing Aperghis and Kagel with Danish ensemble Scenatet, and recording John Cage’s complete Song Books. At the same time, she has built up an idiosyncratic body of solo work, building on a comedy act that she first developed with composer Richard Thomas as part of cult 1990s cabaret troupe Cluub Zarathustra. This act, Kombat Opera, exploited the absurdist incongruity of the 66 67 68 See Heddon, Deirdre/Klein, Jennie (eds): Histories & Practices of Live Art, Basingstoke: Pallgrave Macmillan 2012; and Johnson, Dominic (ed.): Critical Live Art. Contemporary Histories of Live Art in the UK, Oxon: Routledge 2013. Tim Etchells, cited in Hoffmann, Beth: ‘Radicalism and the Theatre in Genealogies of Live Art’, in Performance Research 14 (2009), p. 98; Shalson, Lara: ‘On the Endurance of Theatre in Live Art’, in Contemporary Theatre Review 22.1 (2012), p. 107. Cited in Schulze, Daniel: Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance. Make It Real, pp. 41–43. In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes classical voice, and Lixenberg has continued to use the theatricality of operatic singing to disrupt everyday situations in her participatory, improvisatory ‘real-time operas’.69 These include The PANIC ROOM – The Singterviews (2012-) – in which Lixenberg conducts an interview with a stranger through song, while locked in a ‘space capsule’, to pass the time until the impending apocalypse – and PRET A CHANTER (2016): a pop-up café where customers interact through song, prices are set according to creativity and anyone heard speaking will be ejected by the ‘Anti-Speech Police’. Lixenberg has even extended this practice into her everyday life, by setting up a new political party called The Voice Party with the intention of running in future elections on a platform of free music lessons for children and compulsory singing in parliament. Figure 7: Elaine Mitchener (left) and Sylvia Hallett (right) in the premiere of ‘SWEET TOOTH’ (2017) at Bluecoat, Liverpool Credit: Brian Roberts Elaine Mitchener is another artist who has developed a highly personal voicebased practice through a series of music theatre projects. Trained as a classical vocalist, she began performing on London’s jazz and free music scene while studying, and ended up attending a workshop at David Moss’s Institute for Living Voice. 69 Kombat Opera ultimately grew into Jerry Springer: The Opera (2001), one of the UK’s most successful music-theatrical exports. 141 142 Thom Andrewes Through her involvement in Muziektheater Transparant’s Century Songs project, Mitchener began devising her own work, in collaboration with choreographer Dam Van Huynh and experimental musician David Toop (who invited both Mitchener and Lixenberg to collaborate on his opera Star Shaped Biscuit at Aldeburgh in 2012). Projects like Of Leonardo da Vinci (2015) and Industrialising Intimacy (2015) saw Mitchener hone a performance style based on the physical effects of the voice on the body when pushed to extremes and the reciprocal effects of movement on the voice and breath. This embodied tension can be viewed in relation to the ‘resisting object’, identified by theorist Fred Moten as a central motif of the Black avant-garde of the 1960s: a major inspiration for Mitchener.70 In SWEET TOOTH (2017), her excoriating memorial to the role of slavery in the British sugar industry, this resisting object becomes the historical body of the slave and its legacy. For my final example, I return to Jennifer Walshe, whose work was a major influence on LCMF’s ‘New Definition of Opera’.71 Walshe’s artistic practice frequently overspills the roles of composer, director and performer, in a manner that both engages and extends the aesthetic concerns and strategies presented in her compositional and improvisational work. Projects like the fictional artists’ collective Grúpat (2007-) and the equally fictional Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde (2015), as well as her Snapchat text-score project Thmotes (2013), undermine the coherence of the composer as a fundamental category of the new music discourse, just as her compositions undermine the coherence of the musical medium and her vocal performances undermine the coherence of the individual voice. For Walshe, as for the other artists mentioned, this is a feminist strategy, undercutting an institutional framework constructed to favour masculinist forms of cerebral creativity and recentring music theatre around forms of musical creation that are more accessible and relevant to marginalised artists. To look for a theatrical context to this work while ignoring the category of Live Art would be as misguided as looking for a new British music theatre while discounting the history of pop music: both would constitute a misreading of the situation based on an incomplete understanding of ‘theatre’ and ‘music’ genealogies in the UK. Moreover, the recent history of Live Art as a discourse and a sector offers a convenient model for a more cohesive music theatre scene. The ‘sectoralisation’ of Live Art came through a concerted effort on the part of certain key actors, including Judith Knight at Artsadmin and Lois Keidan at the ICA and Live Art Development 70 71 Moten, Fred: In the Break. The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2003, p. 1. The festival co-commissioned her opera TIME TIME TIME (2019), a collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton and various other musical contributors. In Search of London’s Independent Music Theatre Scenes Association (LADA).72 Central to the success of this process has been the production of a discourse that can justify ‘difficult’ work to funders and the maximisation of that funding’s impact by setting up networks and consolidating audiences.73 At the same time, rather than becoming a ghetto, the Live Art sector supports the creation of experimental work within other sectors, while benefiting from the pre-existing platforms that they provide. Indeed, this work often retains its radical character by remaining embedded in these other disciplinary contexts. Reframing the work discussed in this essay in terms of ‘Live Art opera’ or ‘the Live Art musical’74 could help bridge the existing chasms between disciplines and facilitate the exchange of skills and ideas, promoting a fuller understanding of compositional traditions among artists and audiences from other disciplinary backgrounds. Music-driven work is already well-represented in London’s Live Art institutions, from Graeme Miller and Tim Spooner at Artsadmin, to Brian Lobel and FK Alexander at the NOW Festival.75 As artists reach increasingly into each other’s disciplinary toolboxes, the results could be further enriched by a more communal approach to histories, languages, collaborators and platforms. As a terrain beyond both opera and theatre, Live Art could yet prove the perfect site for their reconciliation. Acknowledgements I would like to thank all my interviewees: Bill Bankes-Jones, Christopher Brett Bailey, Clare Beresford, Timothy Cape, Dominic Conway, Louis d’Heudieres, Richard Dufty, Patrick Eakin Young, Jamie Hamilton, Edward Henderson, Klara Kofen, Catherine Kontz, Ed McKeon, Lore Lixenberg, Neil Luck, Elaine Mitchener, Jenny Moore, Ergo Phizmiz, Caitlin Rowley, Abigail Toland and Igor Toronyi-Lalic. My research has benefited from conversations with Miriam Sherwood, Philipp Amelungsen, Matthias Rebstock and the other contributors to this volume. Special 72 73 74 75 Johnson, Dominic (ed.): Critical Live Art. Contemporary Histories of Live Art in the UK, pp. 19-21; see Klein, Jennie: ‘Developing Live Art’, in Deirdre Heddon/Jennie Klein, J. (eds): Histories & Practices of Live Art, pp. 12-36. See www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about/what-is-live-art (last accessed 17.02.2019). Neither of these terms are newly coined. Lixenberg has referred to her work as ‘live art opera’, while Rajni Shah and GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN have both presented ‘live art musicals’ at SPILL Festival. One major festival, Tempting Failure, now describes itself as ‘London’s Biennial of International Performance Art and Noise’: www.temptingfailure.com/about (last accessed 11.09.2019). Likewise, Somerset House Studios – the experimental workspace established by ex-Almeida Opera director Jonathan Reekie in 2016 – supports the work of musicians, media artists and live artists alike, without making any disciplinary distinctions. New solo projects and collaborations between these artists are showcased in their annual ASSEMBLY season. 143 144 Thom Andrewes thanks go to Patrick Eakin Young: our many conversations about opera and music theatre over the years have had a huge influence on my approach to this chapter. Bibliography Andrewes, Thom: ‘Live Review: London Contemporary Music Festival 2018 @ Ambika P3’, January 2019. 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