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is an opera designed and created for the Gala Pool at Moseley Road Baths, Birmingham. It is also a journey into sound, light and space, drawing on operatic text to create an immersive experience to allow audiences to rediscover this unique, historical building. 

We encounter our Reciter on the balcony of the pool and experience the fantastical world of illusion they inhabit in the moonlight. Explored through Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire we trace her journey down into landing and relationship through Nuance, who dances in reality but also in moonlight to share in her world.

Crucially it is neither purely classic text, nor new composition, as our through-composed soundscape uses the Schoenberg whilst drawing on innovations produced by our spatially led site-specific approach. In this way we shine a new light on aspects of the operatic canon: in the holding space of the Gala Pool, the experience of transitioning from fantasy to reality envelops the audience with resonances created by the community in response to their heritage space. 

a kind of afterlife…echo of the original in a new language…we are constructing an echo, afterlife of the original, converted into spatial materials and instance, rather than translating the text literally.

Bachelard (1964) p.xxiii