Speakers
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Nicole Cabell (USA)
2005 winner of the BBC Singer of the World Competition, Nicole Cabell is a sought-after soprano from Panorama City, CA. Ms. Cabell’s singing career spans from the Metropolitan Opera stage to Carnegie Hall, and she will be starring in the Opera Theatre of St. Louis’s production of William Grant Still’s Highway 1 this Spring. Nicole is also an instructor at the Eastman School of Music and will be co-curating Opera Theatre of St Louis’s Juneteenth Celebration, “I Dream A World”.
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Shirley Thompson (UK)
The conceptual music of composer Shirley J. Thompson is performed and screened worldwide and often described as ‘superbe’ (Le Figaro) as well as ‘powerful and striking’ (Planet Hugill). A visionary artist and cultural activist, Thompson has pushed the boundaries of the classical music with ground-breaking music productions that have attracted new audiences worldwide. Thompson is the first woman in Europe to have composed and conducted a symphony within the last 40 years. New Nation Rising, A 21stst Century Symphony, performed and recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, is an epic musical story celebrating London’s thousand-year history, and one in which the RPO is accompanied by two choirs, solo singers, a rapper and dhol drummers, a total of nearly 200 performers. This extraordinary work was originally commissioned to celebrate Her Majesty the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002 and the concept was latterly assumed as a framework for the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. She co-scored the ballet PUSH that toured to over 40 of the world’s major opera houses, including The Mariinsky Theatre, La Scala and Sydney Opera House. Her opera series, Heroines of Opera, encapsulating narratives of iconic women in history and challenges the concept of the femme fatale, the usual portrayal of women in the operatic cannon. Thompson has consistently demonstrated in her work a belief in the transformative power of music to affect social, cultural and political change.
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Sipumzo Lucwaba (South Africa)
Sipumzo Trueman Lucwaba was born in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Having taught himself the bass guitar, he studied music at the University of the Witwatersrand, and played the bass in professional shows such as Dreamgirls and Dirty Dancing. It is here that his love affair with musical theatre flourished. In 2017 Sipumzo worked alongside Charl-Johan Lingenfelder as musical director and bandleader of the Fugard theatre’s revival of Todd Matshikiza’s King Kong. The show earned Sipumzo a first Naledi award nomination, and he was selected as a Mail and Guardian Top 200 Young South African, 2018. In 2019 Sipumzo created Imivumba YamaQhawe, a high school opera, for Cape Town Opera.
Opera, Commemoration, and the Racialized Politics of Place
16 June 1976: the Soweto Massacre, South Africa. 19 June 1865: the official announcement of emancipation is made to enslaved people in Texas, USA. 22 June 1948: the disembarkation of 1,027 West Indian passengers from HMT Empire Windrush in Tilbury, England.
Commemorating three events that happened in June, BORN draws together an international panel of scholars and practitioners to discuss how Blackness across the Atlantic has been articulated through protest and forced relocation. Shirley Thompson, composer of Memories in Mind: Women of the Windrush, Sipumzo Lucwaba, creator of Imivumba Yamaqhawe: The Scars of Our Heroes, and Nicole Cabell, co-curator of Opera Theatre St. Louis’s I Dream a World Juneteenth celebration, reflect on the individual and shared legacies of Youth Day in South Africa, Juneteenth in the US, and Windrush Day in the UK. Drawing on their own projects, the panellists ask what it means to commemorate racialized oppression and liberation on the operatic stage—a place that carries its own histories of segregation and exclusion. They reflect on opera’s participation in cultures that both hurt and heal, and discuss their own confrontations with the genre’s challenging legacy.
Talking points include:
- the role of opera in commemorating racial violence and/or liberation
- the intersection of opera as ‘globalized’ practice with localized forms of remembrance
- the re-appropriation of a contentious musical form
- the geo-politics of racial subjugation and commemoration on the operatic stage
Moderator
Juliana Pistorius (South Africa/UK)
Panelists
2005 winner of the BBC Singer of the World Competition, Nicole Cabell (USA) is a sought-after soprano from Panorama City, CA. Ms. Cabell’s singing career spans from the Metropolitan Opera stage to Carnegie Hall, and she will be starring in the Opera Theatre of St. Louis’s production of William Grant Still’s Highway 1 this Spring. Nicole is also an instructor at the Eastman School of Music and will be co-curating Opera Theatre of St Louis’s Juneteenth Celebration, “I Dream A World”.
Sipumzo Trueman Lucwaba (South Africa) was born in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Having taught himself the bass guitar, he studied music at the University of the Witwatersrand, and played the bass in professional shows such as Dreamgirls and Dirty Dancing. It is here that his love affair with musical theatre flourished. In 2017 Sipumzo worked alongside Charl-Johan Lingenfelder as musical director and bandleader of the Fugard theatre’s revival of Todd Matshikiza’s King Kong. The show earned Sipumzo a first Naledi award nomination, and he was selected as a Mail and Guardian Top 200 Young South African, 2018. In 2019 Sipumzo created Imivumba YamaQhawe, a high school opera, for Cape Town Opera.
The conceptual music of composer Shirley J. Thompson (UK) is performed and screened worldwide and often described as ‘superbe’ (Le Figaro) as well as ‘powerful and striking’ (Planet Hugill). A visionary artist and cultural activist, Thompson has pushed the boundaries of the classical music with ground-breaking music productions that have attracted new audiences worldwide. Thompson is the first woman in Europe to have composed and conducted a symphony within the last 40 years. New Nation Rising, A 21stst Century Symphony, performed and recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, is an epic musical story celebrating London’s thousand-year history, and one in which the RPO is accompanied by two choirs, solo singers, a rapper and dhol drummers, a total of nearly 200 performers. This extraordinary work was originally commissioned to celebrate Her Majesty the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002 and the concept was latterly assumed as a framework for the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. She co-scored the ballet PUSH that toured to over 40 of the world’s major opera houses, including The Mariinsky Theatre, La Scala and Sydney Opera House. Her opera series, Heroines of Opera, encapsulating narratives of iconic women in history and challenges the concept of the femme fatale, the usual portrayal of women in the operatic cannon. Thompson has consistently demonstrated in her work a belief in the transformative power of music to affect social, cultural and political change.
The event was recorded, watch it on Vimeo: