Week 1: Saturday Events

Begins at 10am with a Singing Entrepreneur Forum, a two day event for singers inspiring success, survival, employability and solvency in the classical music industry. The morning of this second day is dedicated to a round table discussion with the people who are responsible for promoting and employing singers. At 1pm, another discussion picks up on the issues raised throughout the Forum and begins an action plan for how to move forward as a community. At 7pm a woman chainmaker and a journalist tell the story of chain making women in 1910 who were known as the 'white slaves of England' in Victoria Bourne's and Chris Harper's 'The Chainmaker's Strike'. At 7.05pm, the soprano Marie Vassiliou is accompanied by the Piatti Quartet in 'The Lady of Satis House', Jacques Cohen's adaptation of Charles Dickens's 'Great Expectations', which Cohen has set as a monodrama. This is followed, at 8.05pm, by Elvis Herod's 'Mike the Headless Chicken', the story of an invincible decapitated chicken who becomes a celebrity. At 8.10pm, the singers Melanie Pappenheim and Rebecca Askew star in 'Jilted', which imagines a modern day relationship between one of Dickens's most striking characters, Miss Havisham, the aging, jilted bride in 'Great Expectations' and his own wife, Catherine Hogarth. At 9.10pm, future opera company and Ampersandance Dance company presents Alexander Campkin's 'Three to Midnight', a fusion of opera and dance directed by Imogen Tedbury and choreographed by Jamie Thompson. And at 9.15pm the writer, collagist, radio-producer and opera composer Ergo Phizmiz performs excerpts from music-theatre pieces dating back to his early teens, current work-in-progress and experiments.