“Playing with the canon is fun and thrilling when you’re in charge of how you can control and manipulate it. It’s important that all of this comes from a place of artistic love and criticism, and that those things can coexist.”
Amy Bryce
How does an industry so obsessed with the voice leave its performers without one? PLASTIC BODIES — a new experimental opera created by composers, performers, and devisers Amy Bryce, Rosie Middleton, Sarah Parkin, Maya-Leigh Rosenwasser, and Catherine Valve — explores this question through multi-faceted, darkly funny experimental music theatre that sheds light on hidden abuse behind the scenes in the opera industry. With first iterations performed at Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival and hcmf// in 2023, PLASTIC BODIES invites its audience to be both participant and voyeur; using voice, film, electronics and verbatim text to look at intimacy, “femininity”, and power, giving a voice to experiences within an industry that has yet to face up to #metoo.
On Thursday 25th September, PLASTIC BODIES returns to Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival with a full-length, hilarious, dark and enthralling performance. Diving into performer’s voices and autonomy, the piece involves movement, electronics and film from the stage and the rehearsal room.
Ahead of their performance at The Cockpit Theatre, Georgie West sat down with the group of makers and performers to discuss process, caring for each other, approaching heavy themes in the rehearsal room, methods of open score-making and co-creation…
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Georgie/PRXLUDES: PLASTIC BODIES, created and performed by yourselves, has its showing at The Cockpit Theatre on the 25th September. It is lovely to have you all in one place to learn more about what you’ve been making; where are you at in the rehearsal process now, with the performance coming up?
Amy Bryce: It’s very impressive that we’re all here, actually. We’ve struggled over the last few years to get us all even online at the same time, it’s brilliant!
Maya-Leigh Rosenwasser: We have a bunch of days blocked off starting from Monday. We’ve been doing some things over the summer, but we have a solid consecutive chunk of time now, which is nice.
Amy: We’re heavily about to enter do-mode. – laughs-
Georgie: Can you give me an introduction into the world of PLASTIC BODIES, and where the opera came from?
Rosie Middleton: The two pieces we made for the 2023 iteration of this were formed from two connected but separate seeds. One of these came from a long conversation Sarah and I had about misogyny in opera, and an extremely long Google Doc was made. Along the way we thought “maybe we could make this with Amy, Cathy and Maya”, and something came out of that which was the ‘Intimacy Duo’.
Then the other seed: Amy, Maya and I did Larry Goves’s Composition, Alternative Performance and Performance Art (CAPPA) — and we put out a call for singers to share shit said to them during training. From this, we had around 450 responses in three days. That’s kind of where the piece started.
Amy: We wanted to make a piece that was quite hilarious. It came off the back of me thinking about all the weird things singers are asked to do, such as “sing as if your mouth is full of cake” or “like you’ve got cling-film stuck on your face”. To me, that sounded like the groundwork for a really cool, absurdist, lighthearted piece. However, after the callout and the tidal wave of abuse allegations came flooding in, we felt we had to do something different — we realised it was going to be a much wider work.
Sarah Parkin: It was really interesting seeing those responses. There were things that had been said to me in training that I thought had only been said to me, but I realised that the exact same things were being said by the exact same teachers to several people. I had a watershed moment of “oh, it’s not just me, and maybe this is not okay”… I had been treated like I was this angry, outspoken person — and I realised that actually, I don’t think we’re angry enough.
Maya: Amongst those 400 comments were comments reflective of the industry as a whole. Not just from singers, but people who’ve experienced abuse in conservatoires and in the music industry more broadly. It spun out into an uncovering and an opportunity to shine light on things that musicians often go through.
Amy: It was a case of people thinking: “I’m not going to be the one to say anything, as I’m at the beginning of my career and I want to be hired back”.
Sarah: I remember being in dressing rooms and holding women in tears, asking them if they wanted to say anything or bring up issues with the company — and the response I always got to this question was “no, because I want to get hired back next year”. I just got so frustrated with the system.
I think the culture has shifted slightly; people are sort of being scared back into not talking again, because the work is so few and far between (with ACE funding and budget cuts). So work is precious, and therefore everyone is trying to sort of suck it up and not rock the boat. So the last call out we did, we had nowhere near as many responses. Hopefully people who submitted responses will come and see the work as we got good feedback about the level of validation people felt when watching it back in 2023.
Georgie: How have your individual creative practices informed the piece as a whole — and how have you approached collaborative working?
Rosie: For our first iteration we had to find an economical way of working — we had very little funding, and this limited the time we could dedicate to it. We decided to create a 2-minute intimacy scene, which we would perform on loop. In practice, Sarah and I created the scene physically first, and then Amy composed two minutes of music based around the physicality; Maya plays piano here and co-created electronics with Amy, and Cathy created a film to go with it. We were able to work very quickly with this division of labour — using our differing and intersecting skillsets in a very targeted way. We’ve been devising work for years, but often with little or no credit for our artistic contributions. So that has been an important part of the work as well: acknowledging what creative labour is going in, and who it belongs to.
There are also two important things to note about the piece. One is that we’ve tried to put the process into the performance throughout and show our workings. There’s an element of acting, but also reacting to real-time stimuli; this creates stress in real-time rather than us performing. In the intimacy scene we’re reacting to external stresses — it speeds up and up and up and it becomes harder and harder to repeat this scene as it goes. There are parts where each of us have taken a very strong creative lead in making something and there’s others where it’s much more responsive.
Sarah: There was one project we did in particular where we got quite close as colleagues and friends. I remember there was something that Rosie had come up with in a previous project, and it was never credited by the creators in a Q&A. The piece was a very gruelling process, and we were made to feel like these amorphous bodies on stage rather than being seen as the human beings behind the voices. This is not a criticism of anyone’s creative practice — it was just that we didn’t yet know how to be in a creative space with the presence of boundaries. Now that we do, we both want to be more than just a plaything on stage. We want to be our own people with really strong sets of boundaries, and we want to maybe pave a new way for new opera.
A lot of the process for PLASTIC BODIES has been figuring out how to claim our autonomy. What has been really helpful is that both Rosie and Maya are currently doing PhDs. So we get to talk about everyone’s creative practice, and approach to creative practice, in a really involved way where consent is always sought.
Amy: My practice is primarily composition — and being on this project has been interesting, because quite a big part of being a composer is supporting the facilitation of the performers’ autonomy. There was one scene that I was working on with Sarah where she asked me for a score and I was like “well, what kind of score?” I then started scoring it and I stopped when Sarah felt comfortable that she could perform it. So rather than the text being set in a way that is me placing my own compositional identity onto it, it has been directed by Sarah. This doesn’t mean I am any less the composer of the work.
Maya: My PhD focuses on queering practices in different music that I engage with. So working with PLASTIC BODIES over a long period of time has been fascinating, and has been a wonderful project to explore co-authorship — and how to navigate through the difficult stuff that comes with that. When we’re trying to approach alternative methods of making, being, doing, you’re confronted with this sort of hard to navigate, murky material of what it means to credit something; what it means to work with roles, but not necessarily defining yourself by those roles. We have a lot of conversations around reinterrogating what we’re doing, why we’re doing it; is it for the right reasons, is it for the right intentions? It’s also completely changed my practice in loads of other different things that I’m doing.
Catherine Valve: In a wider sense as well, working in this way, with this group, with such a sense of raw honesty between all of us, is something that was quite alien to me a few years ago. I’ve definitely been able to apply that to other work that I do, which has been liberating and life-changing in a way. In terms of my practice, it’s a little bit different to everyone else; in the sense that imagery takes a different timeline to creating everything else. I’m imagining, and trying to communicate what I’m imagining, as things are being made — and then there’s a delay on it actually being produced. It’s been a lot about how everything links up together. The usual process for a visual creator would be production saying “this is what we want it to look like, can you go away and make that” — whereas this has been much more about lacing it all together as we’re going, and considering and changing what it will look like as we compose the work as a whole.
Georgie: The work flips between live game-play, film, movement, electronics, and the rehearsal room; how was it balancing all of these elements and what role do they all play in the work?
Rosie: We do all agree in saying that the composition of this piece is way beyond the notes on the page. Everybody has composed in some way — although there’s a specific composition role that Amy and Maya take in terms of creating music in that form.
Maya: There have been times where we’ve spoken to people, they have been a bit confused about what to say we all do, and then gone “oh, Maya and Amy wrote it” — which is so entirely against what we are trying to achieve!
Amy: Yes, I am the composer on this piece, but that does not mean what you think it means!
Rosie: There are compositional roles being taken across the board.
Sarah: This isn’t the first multi-media project we have worked on together as a five. We originally all got together doing a project called A Kinder Society, which Amy wrote. It was meant to be performed in Dresden, but then COVID happened so we had to pivot. Maya said she knew a filmmaker (Cathy) — and Amy got us into the clock tower at St Pancras (shout-out to Peter Tomkins, who is a big supporter of new music) and we filmed it there. This was how we all got to know each other, and how we got to know the way Cathy works.
When we did the original showing in 2023, Cathy spent a long time going around our rehearsals filming things and then would go away for a few weeks. We could make suggestions — but the vibe was understood across the board that a lot of the raw footage would remain. What I found so validating was seeing how Cathy saw us through the lens of the camera, and how that gets represented on screen. You just know you’re in a safe pair of hands the whole time.
Cathy: Amy and I have a really nice language because we did A Kinder Society together. Therefore I can sort of know exactly what Amy’s envisioning.
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Georgie: Works that tell stories of under-represented groups and, specifically in PLASTIC BODIES’ case, expose the truth behind certain traditions are incredibly important to the progression of these art forms. How do you all feel about the message the opera is sharing and how do you think works such as PLASTIC BODIES fits into the world of opera?
Rosie: There’s a real beauty to a five-year working relationship. I think what you see in the film — more than perhaps on stage — is the product from conversations regarding male, female, and queer gaze theory. One of the things that we started the film with was to show the subtext, and Cathy did some beautiful things in the intimacy scene with zooming in on body parts. With regard to male gaze theory, women in film are typically chopped up and you would only see their breasts, for example; whereas you would see the whole man. Or, men are lit in 3D to show all their complex emotions, as opposed to women being lit in 2D in a more basic and pretty manner. In response to these tropes, Sarah and I aren’t wearing any make-up. This is not something I would normally allow myself to do — as it’s quite a vulnerable position to be in — but it’s part of showing the real experience.
In opera as women, we have to pretend as if everything is okay. For example, women playing deeply vulnerable roles on stage, where they’re prized for being brilliant at playing a victim, or playing somebody that’s been through abuse or femicide. While women and other upper voices are prized for their ability to perform vulnerability onstage, showing signs of distress or illness offstage can be seen as “difficult” and may affect employability. This has improved in the last few years, post the #MeToo movement; it’s still a bit patchy, but conversations around intimacy and sexual violence have improved. The film serves the purpose of showing human beings rather than opera singers at the Opera House.
Amy: I think that there’s something important when talking about how this piece is reflective of how opera behaves. I think one criticism of our piece — for people who don’t get to know it — could very easily be “If you hate opera that much, then just don’t do it” — and our response would be “No, to the contrary, we love opera!”. There are so many brilliant things about opera and “Dead Man Opera” has survived this long because it’s banging.
A lot of these scenes where we are harnessing the sound world of opera throughout the ages has come with an awful lot of reclaiming, which has been extremely valuable for the process. This reclaiming means we can experiment with these tasty musical moments, and they become my playground. I investigate what they are, how they exist compositionally — this is really hard to do and takes a lot of technique, which I am really proud of! Playing with the canon is fun and thrilling when you’re in charge of how you can control and manipulate it. It’s important that all of this comes from a place of artistic love and criticism, and that those things can coexist.
Sarah: We thought about that a lot before it was performed. The thought of “oh, but will people get it?” — and I was like “y’all, don’t worry, we’re hilarious and it’s fine — It’s going to be great!”.
Amy: It’s so funny rehearsing an entire scene that you’ve built over a month, and it’s all been very stressful; we’re painstakingly watching it and trying to time everything correctly. Then the moment it happens in front of an audience, people just start pissing themselves and I was like “oh, it is really funny!”.
Sarah: The audience also laughed harder than I thought they would. The whole process was a masterclass in timing, programming, and learning how to create a space where the audience can laugh. The last showing had two pieces in it; Rosie did it on her own and it landed completely differently. Because we only performed one part at hcmf// — the part with the text from our initial social media callout — the audience were very serious. Whereas when we performed it alongside the intimacy scene in London, there was a lot of laughter; perhaps because they already felt they had permission to laugh.
Georgie: In light of these ways of making and the heavy themes you are addressing in the work, can you discuss the way you went about caring for each other?
Sarah: We do check-ins at the beginning of every rehearsal — and when we don’t, there are emotional consequences. It is more productive to do a quick 10 minute check in, going around the room, than not. It can literally just be “I am so excited to be here with you all today and I have coffee and everything is great!”, but that is integral to the process; because if we miss it or if we don’t do it, then it can mean something happens or a person is not in the right headspace.
It’s not even just about saying how you feel — it’s about putting yourself in the right headspace to do the work, because it is hard. It is hard to sit there and think about how badly people have treated you in your chosen industry for the entire time you’ve been doing it your whole life because of your identity, because of how you were born, it sucks. So we just need to put ourselves in that headspace at the beginning of a rehearsal or a research and development session.
Maya: There’s loads of different institutions and industries where check-ins are used. I think it’s taught in a way where there’s an implication that you just have to say you’re fine and get on with it. That’s why it can sometimes feel naff; because people either say “yes I’m fine” or they dump something in a way that is also not productive. But it is not naff, and is incredibly important to the process.
Sarah: A lot of teachers also say “whatever’s going on at home, leave it at the door” — and I don’t find that helpful. Because all five of us are going to be performing on stage at some point. You need your body in order to be on stage, and your body, mind, and mental health are still part of your instrument and it informs the decisions you make. It informs the amount of risk that is acceptable to take in the room or on stage; it informs absolutely everything. I could be having the worst day ever, and I work really, really hard not to take that out on other people — that’s my job. My job isn’t to leave it at the door, my job is to figure out how to do the best job I can do that day, even though I might be having the worst time ever.
Rosie: Sofia Bagge — our external collaborator and dramaturg — has helped as an outside presence looking in on how we can take care of each other. Even down to simple things such as saying “we can take a break at any point” doesn’t mean we actually are taking a lot of breaks. Sofia’s really embedded care into this project; and I think that that is something that is difficult about a fully collaborative space and a non-hierarchical space, because no one person is responsible for taking care. If everybody’s feeling the stress and the tension is rising, that is when it is great to have an outside person to look at the space and the people in it.
Sarah: I was in a really informative intimacy direction seminar a few years ago. One of the things we had to practice was asking a scene partner “Can I touch you here with the palm of my hand?”, for example. We then had to practice saying yes, and no, to each other. We are so conditioned, especially as women (and opera singers), to never say no. So when Rosie and I first started working with intimacy, we had to practice saying no to each other. You find out that you are more used to saying no than you are to hearing it — but it is important that we hear it without being personally offended or getting defensive.
Rosie: Sofia really pushed us to start saying no to each other, despite us being very comfortable in each other’s presences and having touched each other in previous projects. There’s this value placed on young singers that you need to be up for anything on stage, and you must say yes to everything in order to get more work… So we spent weeks with these really careful questions like “Can I touch your shoulder?”, “Yes”, to make sure we were practicing care. Then in the dress rehearsal, we had a live audience — and suddenly Sarah and I went into overdrive and it got really violent and grabby and was a completely different piece. But afterwards, Sarah asked if that was okay and we talked about it; and it was but only because we have built this practice in from the very beginning.
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Lots of your work explores audience interaction — can you tell me about how you also approached taking care of the audience?
Rosie: For me, it’s not a question of “how do we make an audience feel safe?”, it’s “how do we make them feel safe enough?”. I’m very excited by taking risks on stage, that’s why I did a 12 hour performance. This is an example of making an environment “safe enough”, but some anxiety for me has been that I don’t want to drag everyone into that space if they aren’t comfortable. There is a great phrase in intimacy coordination about space of acceptable risk (because no space is safe for everybody, as trauma is subjective). It’s about how to handle material that’s kind of opt-in, opt-out. Last time, we tried to make people safe by doing the longest content warning that ever existed; and we had feedback that it actually made people feel really stressed because they were expecting it to be much worse than it was. We have now reduced it down.
Sarah: It’s something that was a really good lesson for all of us in terms of figuring out how to pace the piece and knowing when to give the audience a break. We had a session with a sensitivity reader recently, and one of the things we were speaking to them about was: how do we not re-traumatise our audience? Because we’ve been working very hard right from the beginning, one of our rules was that we don’t tell traumatic stories in the room (so that we don’t put ourselves in a bad place when we’re trying to recreate this piece). Instead, we find ways of filigreeing in those feelings or the body reactions, but without retraumatising ourselves, without retraumatising the audience, and making sure that the audience feels validated with what they’re seeing.
One of my main qualms with contemporary opera — specifically the stuff that gets commissioned — is that it is all very traumatic. If you look at the lineup of the biggest new operas that have been commissioned and performed, even just by the Royal Opera House, it’s all incredibly traumatic subject matter. While these works are fantastic pieces in and of themselves, why is it necessary to retraumatise our audience just to get the audience in? What is this fascination that we have with only doing incredibly traumatic material? One of the things we really want to do is make it light and highlight the ridiculousness of the situation.
Georgie: What does the score look like for this work (if there is one)?
Sarah: So many Google Docs!
Maya: In terms of the stuff that I’ve been doing — specifically with electronics — I’ve really thought about whether there is a score. In many ways, yes there is; as a lot of it was based on Amy’s scoring from the first iterations. Now that we’ve done so much reprocessing and reinterrogating, it’s become something that’s more like a “sister score”.
Rosie: The score came out of a relay of Amy sending some text to me and then me improvising and sending it back. In this way, it wasn’t just a score presented to me that I then interpreted; there was a kind of co-creation element prior to the score being set.
Sarah: The score takes a lot of different forms. There are two sort of main scenes where Amy has taken tropes from more traditional opera, such as the intimacy scene. Some of it is in Italian, some of it is in French, and it starts out sounding a little bit like Monteverdi and then ends up in a Debussy-esque thing. And so in this section, it is scored traditionally for mezzo-soprano and piano. Then there is the audition scene where Amy’s written a bunch of one page audition aria excerpts, which are in German, French, Italian. Whereas, my rage aria looks a lot like a text PDF with different icons, different fonts, and is generally a lot more experimental-looking.
Maya: In the electronics in the audition scene, there are pre-composed samples that I made which are also performed live by Amy — because I’m playing the piano. Initially, the Seduce, Relax score was written with House of Bedlam in mind to perform, who then very kindly allowed me to use their recordings as a stimulus for electroacoustic work. I then did a lot of chopping up, warping and creating my own bits to complement it — like little samples — that we now perform live through the laptop.
Georgie: How have you juggled conversations around co-authorship and co-creation in this work? How would you feel about it being re-performed in relation to discussion of the presence (or sometimes not) of a physical score?
Maya: We definitely don’t want this to be the last time that we perform this. I think it’s really important to have a score because hopefully we’re going to be doing this again and again, and we want to be able to look back on what we did this time.
Amy: The question of transferring ownership is really interesting. If we got different performers to do it, for instance, those performers would only take over the performing aspects of what Rosie, Sarah, Maya and myself at points put into it. We would not be able to transfer that side of ownership to anybody else.
Sarah: There’s also a pacing and a trust to the level of improvisation. It’s not the same piece every time that we do it. In that respect, it would need a whole host of rehearsals with somebody else in order to find that level of pacing and trust.
Amy: It is interesting, as there doesn’t seem to be this problem in dance or in theatre — where so often performers are integral to the making of the piece, and choreography gets repeated. Nobody would ever say that a script is the be all and end all. There is so much to traditional musical scores, as there is to text in a theatrical setting. I think it’s reductive to have the opinion that if a score doesn’t “give everything”, it subsequently lends itself to not being “correctly” performed by another performer.
Rosie: For me, the important thing would be the process — and embedding the important elements of our process. It could never just be an opera company taking it on and acting in a normal hierarchical way; the performers would have to have agency. It could absolutely be performed by others if the care and respect of the process was practiced.
Maya: Another example of the difficulty with reperforming a piece like this is that I have been in these, what I call, “privileged” spaces with Rosie and Sarah, where I have had permission to record them laughing, etc. in the rehearsal room — which I have subsequently used in the electronics. This would have to be perfectly recreated by others. They would have to find a new process of how people would record their own versions of that, because it’s not the same when I’m playing samples of your voices. They would have to build their own privileged spaces.
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PLASTIC BODIES – created and performed by Amy Bryce, Rosie Middleton, Sarah Parkin, Maya-Leigh Rosenwasser, and Catherine Valve – takes place on Thursday 25th September at The Cockpit Theatre, London, as part of Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2025 – tickets are available at:
Learn more about the creatives behind PLASTIC BODIES:
