Livya and Shamini are on work experience this week, working with ENO Baylis. They are writing a daily blog on their experiences at ENO and especially this week’s project based on Janáček’s opera, Jenufa. Both are talking with the other young people taking part in the project and finding out about how the production is coming along. Livya and Shamini are Year 10 students from Kingsbury High School, a 2015 Opera Squad school.

Tuesday 26 July 2016

Following in yesterday’s footsteps, we attached another two questions to the wall for all the participants and ourselves, to answer. Our first one was “What’s the best performance you’ve ever seen and what did you like about it?” and “What is the best performance you’ve ever been in and what was the best thing about it?” We received many responses to these questions, which we really enjoyed reading.

For our second session, we were split up and allocated to the different teams (design and performance). During the design session, the warm up was arranged to let loose and develop any ideas, even if they weren’t the best. After this, the students brainstormed ideas for the final production and then split into groups to focus on different segments. Samira, a member of the design team, told us that it was “enjoyable and quite interesting” and “working in little groups was quite useful.” In a different studio, half of the performance team were working on writing lyrics for their upcoming performance. We began with a drama exercise that entailed being confident and speaking the first thing that came to mind. This enabled a better working atmosphere as everyone was relaxed and more comfortable. After this, we were split into smaller groups to write lyrics about a certain topic. This was then put to music and developed into a song. Each group had to learn the songs from other groups as well as theirs. One of the students, Rachel, said that her favourite part was “collaborating with the small groups” as this was different for her and she was “excited to hear others ideas.”

The last sessions for today include Ruairi and Hannah leading a session on folk music as this was a key aspect of the Jenufa opera.

Today was just as fun as yesterday!

Shamini and Livya.