The Paddock is always developing new ideas for projects that inspire and engage our local communities as well as bring together professional artists of this region in new collaborations. These are some of the musical things we are dreaming about at the moment.The Commute – An Opera for Towns
Developed by the same team who created The Finnish Prisoner, The Commute is the story of one person’s journey from work to home. A journey that should take fifteen minutes, half an hour, an hour at most, but on this day, ends up taking much, much, longer. The piece will be specifically created for venues common to most towns, a playing field, a town hall, a leisure centre, a pedestrian shopping street, and performed promenade-style in each of these venues during the length of an entire day. Audiences will be free to follow the whole story in one day, or to see various chapters of our protagonist’s long journey home on different days. As in The Finnish Prisoner, we would once again employ a combination of professional and amateur performers, as well as merging different art forms, with music as the common thread, so we would be looking for all kinds of participants – dancers, actors, singers, musicians – to join the company.
4 X 4
This is an opera project set in four rooms of a disused house. Four composers are commissioned to look at chamber opera in a domestic setting, with each room designed as a completely different atmosphere into which the audience are submerged. The audience will be split into four groups, entering each room in rotation. We are presently in conversation with the Brighton Festival and Glyndebourne Festival Opera as to ways of developing this idea in partnership.
