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.

Wednesday, 27 July 2016:

Today, we spoke to the design team. They told us a lot about what they’ve been getting up to recently. Currently, they have been working on the props and scenery for the Jenufa performance on Friday.

They were split into small groups which “helped with their concentration” and each group was given a different job to do. For instance, one group were making a tree using cling film, wires and plastic; another group worked on a statue of Jenufa, made of bubble wrap and cling film.

They also told us that they frosted fake fruits with salt, water and PVA glue to make an icy sort of texture and as a result was “fun and messy.”

The final group worked on creating a table cloth for the huge dining table seen in the production; this included sticking symbolic pictures, words related and pieces of poetry that were created by the performance team.