Melanie Wilson: Women Make Music

The Women Make Music Fund is supporting Melanie Wilson to develop a new opera.

Melanie Wilson: “I make performances, installations and audio works that centre upon the uses of sound and language as distinct, subjective and sculptural agencies. My most recent performance, Landscape II, distilled live performance and live sound together with a brooding and poetic use of film and projection to create an elemental portrait of three minds rooted together by a landscape.

I am interested in the meeting point between abstract sound design, contemporary classical music, spoken and sung voice and in the power of voice, movement and projection to create spectacular stage portraits which balance beauty and violence.

The opera will be a piece with and about women and will use science fiction as an allegorical technique to comment on female experience and its future.

I will work with a mixed group of performers, including classical singers, choir singers and performers and will explore the uncanny expansion of their voices through computer processing, as a quality of the vocal aesthetic alongside more traditional approaches to singing.

I will continue my collaboration with film artist Will Duke which we began this year on my previous project Landscape II.”

“[A] hauntingly intense multi-media monologue” **** The Herald