Waste Paper Opera - performative lecture

Event Details

Literature, Environment and the Arts Season 2023

Waste Paper Opera

In this performative lecture, artistic directors James Oldham and Klara Kofen will explore and synthesise the sometimes disparate, sometimes jarring, often beautiful and sometimes funny elements from which Waste Paper Opera creates their cosmologies: drawing on their experience of translating environmental and historical data into live performance, they will offer up an idea of how ‘opera’ as a form, and opera making as a collaborative process, can act as a simulation connecting the ethereal and abstract to the real weight of bodies, human, non-human and celestial.

James Oldham

James is a composer and performer based in London, and the co-Artistic Director of Waste Paper Opera. His composition work has been commissioned by Riot Ensemble, Ideas of Noise Festival, the Medical Research Council and by Joe Lycett. He is an active experimental performer, regularly working with Brooklyn-based performance group Object Collection. His main research focuses on comic timing in music, audience expectation, and interruptions.

Klara Kofen

Klara is a writer, researcher, director and artist with a background in intellectual history. Klara’s research interests lie in cross-disciplinary collaboration, engaging with the communicative space between human and non-human actors, Early Modern history, and opera as a medium in the context of Western intellectual history. Her artistic practice encompasses live performance, film, sound and text.