From the Artistic Director

CHAMBER MADE OPERA

So close you can reach out and touch it

I suppose it all started when I found myself as a twelve-year-old on the stage of the old Palais Theatre in St Kilda, holding the hand of La Stupenda, Dame Joan herself. I was one of the flower boys in the Australian Opera's production of Otello, and I had got the bug. I don't know if it was the street urchin body make-up, the huge thunder sheet or the surging strings, but ever since I have found myself pulled towards art that brings together all the artforms.

I have always love the intimacy of performances in small spaces. For me, the living room is the perfect place to give new work its first performance. Risks can be taken that large theatres can no longer afford. We can get beneath the skin of the work by being so close to it, and under the skin of the artists as we meet them in the semi-formal context of an opera in a home.

The Living Room Opera that we are nurturing into existence can go on to have lives beyond the premiere season in someone's home. Some of these small once-act artworks will take off into other living rooms, or theatres and venues in other parts of Australia and beyond.

I like to think that we are changing the world with art, one living room at a time, because art has the ability to imagine possible figures. It makes us think things that we otherwise could not imagine, and brings forth the unendurably absent.

David Young, Artistic Director