John Bird Music Research Seminar - Dr Robert Fokkens

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Making Opera in Liminal Spaces, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Boulez’s Bombs

My creative work in combining music, voice, text and theatre has always involved approaches which explore the inherent intersectionality and imaginative potential of the medium, rather than the received limitations and restrictions of the operatic genre and industry. Works such as Contact (2010), Love Songs (2011), Flights into Darkness (2009), The Application (2015), and Bhekizizwe (2020) all explore spaces between the oppositional ideas which often dominate the debate around opera, including notions of high and low art; the genre distinctions between opera, music theatre, musicals and total theatre; and the divide between Global North and Africa. More recent work with Music Theatre Wales where I have facilitated, supported and been part of a the creative team making The House of Jollof (2023) and The Things That Go Unnoticed (2022) actively continue in this vein, exploring respectively the intersections between rap, food and opera, and the varied creative interests of young people within a musical-dramatic space.

I have come, through this work, to the view that its intrinsically liminal nature provides a valuable position from which to consider how to respond creatively to the often challenging public debates surrounding the place of opera in culture today. Drawing on my experiences developing new work in this medium, devising and managing an Impact project around Bhekizizwe in 2022, knowledge of other recent work in the medium, working with Music Theatre Wales, and engaging in various research fora which are actively exploring the future of opera from a range of perspectives, I will seek to articulate the questions driving my own work and that of other creators working in this world. In closing, I will seek to bring these ideas into focus by introducing the project I am currently developing with librettist Mkhululi Mabija.