The Knight Crew | Glyndebourne

Staged in Spring last year and featured in a three-part documentary presented by Gareth 'The Choir' Malone,  The Knight Crew marked a step-change for education at Glyndebourne.  Envisioned as ‘commissioned work of exceptional quality for young people to perform and come to as an audience’ and nearly three years in the making, this was in many ways the most ambitious – and certainly the most expensive – project ever undertaken by the education department: a professional opera premièred on the main stage, with a top-flight artistic team behind it, including Julian Philips, Glyndebourne’s first composer-in residence; a clutch of professional soloists; an orchestra over half of which (37 out of 50) was drawn from young non-professionals aged 13 to 19; a 52-strong main chorus almost entirely composed of teenagers with little if any experience, drawn from over 500 young people from local schools in poorer areas of the region; a small choral group of almost all similarly untried women, chosen to represent their mothers; and yet anotheramateur chorus composed of 12-year old boys.

 The subject matter was ambitious, too – addressing the whole vexed issue of gang-based youth culture, its obsession with respect and its tragic fixation on defending its territory, often backed up with the threat and use of knives.  Where West Side Story famously took Shakespeare’s story of Romeo and Juliet as a framing device for its tale of warring New York tribes, The Knight Crew viewed its young protagonists through the lens of the legendary King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.  Notions of kingship, loyalty and honour in those stories find their contemporary equivalent in the urban wasteland, where the bag-lady, Myrtle, appears to be the latest incarnation of Merlin, with the gift of prophecy: Art will be king, she says, and so it turns out to be.

 An extract from my evaluation report will be posted in due course.  In the meantime, a full account of the process - including outcomes from the evaluation – can be found at http://glyndebourne.com/story-knight-crew-project

Conversations with an elephant

One of the most memorable London cultural events of the 21st century so far has to be The Sultan's Elephant.  Created and performed by French company Royal de Luxe, this public extravaganza took the capital almost completely by surprise over the first weekend in May 2006.  The arrival of a twenty-foot high little girl from outer space and a elephant parading through the heart of the old Empire changed many people's perceptions of what art and theatre and spectacle might mean, including it seems Arts Council England's.  Some initial reactions from the professional arts world were aired the following Monday at a conference convened by LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre), which had supported Artichoke Production's risky proposal to put on the show in the first place.  I was commissioned to write up the conference and my report is downloadable here.  It covers the impact of the weekend's events as well as the conference discussions - and it is unashamedly personal in tone.  This was one arts project I will never forget, along I suspect with the thousands of others who witnessed it.  Artichoke continues to promote the unexpected and its more recent activities can be seen at www.artichoke.uk.com/ and LIFT, too, continues to break new ground, as a visit to www.liftfestival.com will demonstrate.

 

Click here to download:
LIFT Conversations about an Elephant.pdf (1.43 MB)
(download)