A first listen to one of my favourite tracks from our new opera/album Silk Threads on the New Music Show! Towards the end of a really enjoyable programme of music 🥰🙌🏻 LINK IN BIO
✨ Meet the voices behind our upcoming Future of Opera workshop with ENO’s Tuning into Opera
Bob Holland (ENO)
Lauren Monaghan-Pisano (ENO)
Dr Alexandra Huang-Kokina (University of Manchester; Operactive Arts)
Dr Kamila Rymajdo (ENO)
Dr Jennifer Cearns (University of Manchester)
Cliona Cassidy (Soprano & experimental vocalist)
From ENO’s senior leadership to human-centred AI researchers, this panel explores bold questions. Can AI become an invisible partner that deepens connections between performers and audiences? Can it enable new forms of audience engagement before, during, and after the show?
With recent concerts introducing humanoid AI performers on stage, we’re exploring a different path that centres human artists and their embodied craft, rather than replacing them.
🔴 Expect conversations on:
– Audience agency and emotional feedback systems
– Rethinking opera for a diverse, digitally connected public
– The role of artists in designing future creative technologies
⚡ Plus: a live demonstration of our Emotion Engine: a system that senses the emotional ‘temperature’ of the room and feeds it back into performance.
📍 Manchester | 19 May | 4-7pm
🎟️ Limited spaces: link in bio
#FutureOfOpera #OperaInnovation #ImmersiveArt #DigitalPerformance #CreativeAI #ManchesterEvents
Just one short week until Hexakaidecagon is joined by our friend Clíona Cassidy at Counterflows on April 9th, 23.00 at The Art School Assembly. This will be the second time Clíona is performing with us and we’re super psyched to have her fearless intensity on hand to turn the joint upsidedown!
Clíona Cassidy is a Dublin-born soprano, composer, and experimental vocalist working at the intersection of opera and improvisation. She has worked regularly with Scottish Opera since 2012 and is a longstanding member of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra.
@counterflowsfest@cliocassidy@benicio.del.trainwreck
Delivery!!! Silk Threads, our episodic, improvised opera has arrived!! Out soon.. watch this space.. ❤️😍🎉🎭🎵🔥 thanks to @kriskesiak for the brilliant photos!! And Louis McHugh for the ace recording, mixing and editing!
Join us on the 5th March at 7pm in the Reid Hall, Edinburgh for a performance of Hiatus with the wonderful @cliocassidy , as well as a selection of new works by the collective. This event is free to attend, you’ll find the eventbrite link in our bio.
‘Hiatus’ is my most personal piece, and I’m genuinely excited that I get to do it again with the brilliant, fierce, creative women and men of the New String Collective next Thursday 5th at the Reid Hall, Edinburgh, hosted by the Edinburgh College of Art. LINK TO TICKETS IN BIO and they are FREE. Here’s a note on what it’s about:
HIATUS (2023)
This piece is my response to the traditional classical song cycle structure - a series of songs on a theme, usually performed together, in sequence, in recital.
This improvised song cycle centres the space between the songs - the charged, animated silence between the moving parts, where the audience and performer drop pretence and their experience momentarily merges. The pull towards authenticity is like the pull of gravity. A taught wire releases, and we continue to listen, to watch, while the performer puts down the mask, and we are all alive in the same soundscape.
The three songs of this song cycle are half memories, brought together from past places, into the present, arrested in time. The hiatus between them is both the forgetting and the preserving place - strands of memory, painted in mercury, preserved because there is no breath to make them live or evolve.
As the piece progresses, the hiatus slowly expands, and the balance between Things that Happen* and the wait space of memory, past trauma and forgetting shifts.
* Things that Happen is an epic poem written by my uncle, the Irish modernist poet Maurice
Scully (1952-2023)
Hexakaidecagon is playing tooonight at @eventsresearchprogramme ‘s Krimbo Scene. We’ll be joined in the flesh by unstoppable super force @cliocassidy while @benicio.del.trainwreck will phone in his parts from a dude ranch somewhere in the western USSA….We play first at 8:30pm. Come say hello YO!
Ahmed Muin Abu Amsha: “There is no real ceasefire. Every day they are bombing. Every day they are killing.”
“And I know, someday, Palestine will be free, by your work, and by our resilience.”
Amazingly, Ahmed Muin Abu Amsha will call us from Gaza, if conditions allow it, with his guitar to introduce and lead our Action. Please join us to show him that Glasgow is listening. Faisal Saleh, founder of the Palestinian Museum, will also call us to speak. Buchanan Street Galleries, Monday 8th, 6pm. If it’s raining and you don’t want to bring your instrument, come and sing!
