Thanks to everyone at Northern Stage – you have been amazing. The installation looks fantastic in the space. It stays in Newcastle until Saturday evening and it might be the last time it will be in the UK this year!
Next up is the Nemo Festival in Paris on 8/9 April. The installation is being presented at Centquatre which is a fabulous venue.
We are in final discussions with the British Council, The Choir of Hope and Inspiration, Melbourne’s Federation Square (Light in Winter Festival) and Macquarie Group Foundation to take My Secret Heart to Australia in June 2010. The tour would be similar to that in Japan last year where we presented the installation and worked with groups in the region. We are very excited about the possibility of showing our work in Australia and working with the world-famous Choir of Hope and Inspiration!
Mira Calix, the composer who wrote Streetwise Opera’s current work, My Secret Heart has won a British Composer Award.
The award was presented at an event in London hosted by BASCA (The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors), the Performing Rights Society and BBC Radio 3. Listen to a programme broadcast on Radio 3 about the awards here.
The award panel described My Secret Heart as ‘transformational’.
BBC Radio 3 will play a 15-minute extract of MSH on 23rd Nov at around 7pm as part of Performance on 3 in a programme featuring the pieces shortlisted for the British Composer Awards (Mira Calix has been shortlisted for MSH). Keep fingers crossed for Mira and all of us – the award ceremony is on 1 Dec!
If you missed it on the radio you can ‘Listen Again’ for 7 days here
The total audience for My Secret Heart has topped 125,000 – including audiences for live presentations, internet hits, presentations on the BBC Big Screens and the tour. We’ve still got a number of tour dates fixed for 2010 so we aiming for an audience of 150,000!
Mira Calix has been shortlisted for the British Composer Awards for My Secret Heart. We find out on 1st December whether she has won. Congrats to her and fingers crossed!
We’re very much looking forward to taking My Secret Heart to the Taliesin Arts Centre in Swansea on 20 November. Taliesin will also be hosting a conference on homelessness before the public screening of the installation where arts and homelessness organisations together with funders and policy-makers are gathering to discuss the kind of work Streetwise Opera does coming to Wales.
In early 2010 the installation will be in Newcastle for two exciting presentations. Firstly we’ll be at the Discovery Museum from 9-15th January in the Great Hall. Then we are in final discussions with Northern Stage about presenting the installation as part of their 40th anniversary celebrations in February.
We’ve now been touring My Secret Heart for 10 months and everywhere we have gone, organisers and audiences have been amazing. We have just arrived back from a British Council-supported tour of Japan. Together with presentations of the installation at Yokohama’s 150-year celebration festival and Creative Cities Symposium we also screened the 7-minute film at Super Deluxe in Tokyo with Mira Calix and Rob from Flat-e performing a live set.
The presentations of My Secret Heart were only part of the story – the British Council helped us to run workshops with homeless people and artists in Osaka and Yokohama, sharing our model of work and helping to grow and develop the community arts movement. The British Council had also made links with a huge array of social entrepreneurs, artists, support workers, policy-makers and academics to help spread our work as widely as possible.
The two areas we were working in – Kamagasaki in Osaka and Kotobuki in Yokohama are very isolated areas of homeless and disadvantaged people. Over 90% are elderly men although more and more young people are also living in these areas. With the help of some inspirational social activists (Kanayo Ueda from Cocoroom in Kamagaski and Tomohiko Okabe from Koto-Lab in Kotobuki) we engaged with residents of the area. There was an existing theatre group called Musubi in Kamagasaki and we worked with them to introduce music into their work and to write a song with them which will fit into their new play. We performed this together at the Aqua Festival in Yokohama.
We have felt enormously privileged to be involved in this work – although the community arts movement and the support infrastructure for homeless people is less developed that in the UK, the work on the ground is exceptional and it was an honour to be part of this. A massive thank you to all those we worked with, especially the British Council in Japan for making it happen.
My Secret Heart has just picked up a Royal Philharmonic Society Award which are the most prestigious awards in the classical music sector. The award is for Audience Development in association with Classic FM. Congratulations to everyone involved.
Hi everyone – well the tour has started with a bang! We began with a screening of the 7-minute version in Middlesbrough on the BBC Big Screen on 29th Jan. It was FREEZING! But thanks so much to the Wellington St gang who came out in force to perform some numbers for the premiere. The piece is going to be on all the BBC Big Screens round the country – there are 17 of them in various towns and cities and you can see the full list here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bigscreens/
Then last week from 12-14 Feb we had the first leg of the installation tour at the Light Night Festival in Notts. Huge thanks to the Notts group for coming out to take part in the discussion we organised (particularly for your speech Kevin). Then the installation was run for 3 days and a few hundred people came. It looks so awesome when it is playing in a dark room – in this case a church. Amazing. I’ll load some photos onto this site
I’m so proud of what we have achieved and what the Streetwise performers have produced. It is fantastic and so are you!
Next date in the diary is a screening at Tyneside Cinema on 7th March. More info to follow!
Matt
