Melanie Wilson: The Open Fund for Music Creators
Melanie Wilson is a U.K. based multi-disciplinary performance and sound maker. Her acclaimed work is founded on the contemporary interplay between sound art, experimental forms of composition, language and live performance. Her unique idiom spans theatre, opera, experimental music, film and installation, and has been presented in the U.K and internationally. She regularly composes and makes sound for director Katie Mitchell, most recently ‘Orlando’ for Schaubühne, Berlin.
The Birthstrike Project is a collaboration between Melanie Wilson (music/text) and Jessica Latowicki (text). Taking the gathering momentum of the Birthstrike movement as inspiration, the project creates a polyphonic electro-opera performance from the voices of women and men who are placing their bodies at the forefront of climate change activism.
Based on the experience of young British women who are refusing to have children as a protest against the accelerating extinction of planetary ecosystems, the project sings the experience of the non act of motherhood as a radical political decision, and how that decision challenges the narratives we tell ourselves about our humanity and reframes the power of women to change the future.