Intro/main

History

Founded in 1980, Station House Opera has developed into an internationally-renowned performance company with a unique physical and visual style. The work varies enormously in scale, appearance and location and uses spectacle to explore the intimate relationship between people and the environment they inhabit. Described as "visionary as it is stunningly visual", the company have created spectacular projects in a variety of locations all over the world, from New York's Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage to Dresden's historic Frauenkirche and Salisbury Cathedral. More recently their work has been uniquely created for more intimate spaces all over Europe including Orangerie in Dijon, an old electrical factory in Weimar and London's 19th century music hall at Hoxton Hall.

Over twenty one years the company have created over twenty five productions. Natural Disasters, Sex and Death and Cuckoo introduced an unexpected instability to the mundane physical world of the performers while other pieces took precariously to the air with Drunken Madness suspended under the Brooklyn Bridge and Scenes from a New Jericho in the sky above Amsterdam.

The company is best known for its series of architectural performances using breeze blocks beginning with A Split Second of Paradise followed in 1988 by Piranesi in New York at the First New York International Festival of the Arts, commissioned by Creative Time for the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage.

These two projects paved the way for The Bastille Dances, which premiered in France during Bicentenary Year in Cherbourg's Gare Maritime in June 1989. A company of 15 performers and musicians made a spectacular constantly moving sculpture with 8,000 concrete blocks depicting the French Revolution, subsequently presented on London's South Bank as part of LIFT, in Amsterdam, Salzburg and Barcelona.

Black Works co-commissioned by the ICA London, Creative Time New York, Mickery Amsterdam, Theater Gessnerallee Zurich and Granada Festival, toured extensively in Britain, Europe and North America during 1991. On a coal-black floor a downpour of flour fell from the ceiling like fine snow, the performers beneath using brooms and their bodies to trace abstract designs, figurative drawings and cartoons.

In 1993 Julian Maynard Smith was awarded the Kettles Yard Fellowship at Cambridge University. Limelight, a production based on pre-electric forms of lighting, premiered at Kettles Yard Cambridge in December 1995 and formed one of the opening events of Copenhagen'96, European City of Culture in January 1996.

Two more large scale outdoor architectural projects took place over the following years. Dedesenn nn rrrrrr in front of the city's famous Frauenkirche was commissioned by Theater der Welt in Dresden. One year later, the Salisbury Festival commissioned The Salisbury Proverb s , a monumental new work in front of the Cathedral involving 25 performers, singers and musicians and the Salisbury Festival Chorus.

Station House Opera's film for the Arts Council/BBC2's Expanding Pictures series, Warren Beatty's Coat, was transmitted on television in 1997 and at the 1998 Rotterdam Film Festival.

In May 1998 Snakes and Ladders was commissioned by ACME Studios in East London to celebrate their 25th anniversary and the opening of their new work/live studios. Using life size video, the six performers and their virtual doppelgangers scaled the length and breadth of the old Fire Station's façade becoming comically confused as the actual mixed with the virtual.

Since it first opened at the ICA in 1998, Station House Opera's production Roadmetal, Sweetbread has toured worldwide, with performances in Europe, China, the Lebanon, Hong Kong, Japan. Taiwan and Brazil. With two performers and life size videom, this "little classic of end of the century performance art" (The Scotsman) continues to tour in the UK and abroad and will remain in the company's repertoire throughout 2007 and beyond.

Station House Opera's Mare's Nest was co-produced by and premiered at La Batie Festival, Geneva, in September 2001. This is a play about double, triple and quadruple lives interacting in a complex, augmented space where architecture and video meet. Mare's Nest has been performed at the South London Gallery; the Tramway, Glasgow as part of New Territories; the Nuffield Theatre in Lancaster; and has toured abroad to Mulhouse, Vienna, Florence, Barcelona, Nantes, Reims and Hamburg. The piece is being retained in the company's repertoire with the possibility of future touring.

In an important collaboration, Station House Opera were invited to open the new Hampstead Theatre, the first new purpose-built theatre in London for a quarter of a century. The company created a unique site-specific project, How To Behave, to launch the theatre in January 2003. Playing with time and space and using live performance and video, Station House Opera took the audience on a tour throughout the building, offering an unexpected and thrilling experience with which to celebrate this beautiful new theatre.

From 2004 to 2006, Station House Opera produced a series of performances under the name of Live from Paradise, each performed simultaneously between three locations. In each venue an audience watches a live performance, alongside video streamed over the internet from the two other locations projected on screens placed side by side. The series draws on Station House Opera's work combining live and filmed performance; three performances together creating a larger fourth performance, telling intertwined stories that are both universal and true to each venue's own localities, cultures and concerns.

In November 2004, Station House Opera collaborated with Dutch theatre company De Daders to create the first Live From Paradise in three locations in Amsterdam; this piece was re-developed for a simultaneous performance in London, Colchester and Birmingham in May & June 2005. These shows were followed by two major international collaborations: Play on Earth took place in June 2006 across three continents and time zones in front of audiences in Newcastle, Sao Paulo and Singapore; and The Other is You was presented in November 2006 in Brighton, Berlin and Groningen.

Education

Station House Opera run educational initiatives for students and fellow

artists, designed to make their work accessible to all and to share skills

and approaches to performance work. Workshops connected with current

productions are held nationally and internationally. Work placements are

available on tours both in the UK and abroad. Lectures are held to develop

an academic context to their work. An archive of the company's productions

is available to all.

Workshops

Station House Opera runs workshops for people of all ages and interests.

They can encompass a broad range of performance ideas used and developed by the company, or may be tailored to a specific set of ideas associated with a particular production. They are addressed to participants of varying degrees of knowledge and experience of performance work.

With all performances in the UK and most foreign tours the company plan a

series of accompanying workshops. In recent years they have worked

extensively with live performance and life-size video, and have held

workshops using new technology with older school-children and students

Apart from those educational workshops which are designed to disseminate

known ideas and techniques, workshops may be also instigated as part of the creative natural 'breathing' of the company's ongoing existence as a

performance group, or as part of the introductory sessions in the

development of a new production.

Next workshop: Feb 25th - March 1st 2008, New Territories Winter School (Lose Your Mind), Tramway, Glasgow, UK

Work Placements

The company offer work placements to applicants who are interested in involvement in Station House Opera's work, and especially aims to provide opportunities for BME candidates. These internships offers practical, hands on experience in all areas of production and the creative process. Internships take place for different lengths of time depending on the nature of each Station House Opera project. In recent years work placement students have been involved in productions in London, Glasgow, Vienna and Brighton.