Sixty stroke survivors to perform in online opera
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In a time of global isolation, a community of the UK’s most isolated and vulnerable people are overcoming barriers to join together online to create an opera about love after stroke. The sixty stroke survivors are being supported by pioneering arts-health organisation Rosetta Life and by their carers to overcome the physical and neurological difficulties that prevent them from using tools that most take for granted: keyboards, microphones, headphones and the internet. Together with professional musicians and the Adult Community Company from Garsington Opera, they will rehearse and film a new short opera, I Look For The Think, based on the lived experience of participant Kim Fraser and his wife and carer, Sarah. The show will be shared with participants online on July 22nd before the final version is released on 28th August. The work will be toured as a series of screening events, and will be projected onto the ward walls of Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Oxford, Bristol and London NHS Trusts.
Composed by Orlando Gough, I Look For The Think explores the uncertainty and anxiety of being discharged from hospital after a stroke both for the patient and for the new carer, and the challenges of loving anew. For the patient, it can be a painful journey to find a new way of living with the altered capacity to move, speak and express themselves. For the carers, it throws up some heart wrenching questions of whether their new charge is the same person they fell in love with, and can they fall in love with the new person they’ve become?
Since June, participants from London, Reading and Bristol have been rehearsing across Zoom. The participants received sound recordings and video footage to watch before the group teaching sessions and then they record themselves and send their recordings to Rosetta Life to edit into the final film. The participants will form the patients’ chorus in I Look For The Think alongside Garsington Adult Community Company as the staff chorus, a carers’ chorus drawn from the groups, and soloists Robert Gildon and Melanie Pappenheim.
Rosetta Life was founded in 1997 to use arts in health innovation to change the way we perceive the elderly, frail, disabled, and those who live with life limiting illnesses. Their work with stroke communities, Stroke Odysseys, started as a song cycle developed as part of Derry, City of Culture 2013. Since then, Rosetta Life has produced Hospital Passion Play, which was performed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2017, Stroke Odysseys, which premiered at The Place before touring, choreographed by Ben Duke and composed by Orlando Gough. Orlando Gough is known for his operas, choral music, music for dance and theatre, and is a former Associate Artist at the Royal Opera House. I Look For The Think is an extension of Act 2 of Hospital Passion Play.
Creative Director of Rosetta Life Lucinda Jarrett said, “The pandemic has compelled all arts organisations to change and often radically adapt their practices. We are grateful that it has given us an opportunity to bring all our ambassadors groups across the country to perform together in the short online opera I Look for the Think. We hope that the Ambassadors will recognise that they are part of a growing national movement that puts their creative voices at the heart of the story of recovery.”
Stroke Odysseys is one of three interventions, all of which have been proven to improve patient health, that will be trialed among larger groups of people within NHS hospitals as part of SHAPER, the world’s largest study into the impact of arts on mental health. SHAPER – Scaling-up Health-Arts Programmes: Implementation and Effectiveness Research – has been launched by King’s College London and UCL. The study also encompasses arts interventions Melodies for Mums and Dance for Parkinson’s. More information about the study can be found here.
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