People.
Outland Opera is lucky to be working with a team of exceptional and diverse talent from the world of opera and beyond.
We are already committed to equitable gender representation and are working towards greater ethnic and LGBTQ+ diversity as our charity grows.
Staff
Ruth Knight, Artistic Director
Ruth is an international opera director, who specialises in adapting opera for unusual places and spaces.
Ruth’s concert staging of Britten’s Gloriana at the London Coliseum received 5 stars in the Guardian, and Opera magazine described it as “an exemplary semi-staging, meticulously rehearsed in detail and drama”. Her recent revival of Peter Konwitschny’s La Traviata, also for English National Opera, was similarly well received by the national press, including The Stage: “This is an exciting case of a revival director bolstering the original with detail”. Upcoming productions include a new commission, The Sandman and the Dew Fairy for the Royal Opera, and a new semi-staged Edgar for Opera Holland Park.
Alongside her work for Outland Opera, Ruth is the stage director for Adam Dickson’s London-based artistic collective, Salon Opera (Tosca, Hung Up, Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Phaedra, Madama Butterfly, Carmen and Worthy is the Lamb).
Ruth has a background working for educational charities and has a keen interest in engaging new audiences with classical music, particularly young people and those with special education needs. She is studying for a degree in Psychology in her spare time.
Photo by Harry Livingstone.
Contact: ruth@outlandopera.com
Creative Team - The Stones Sing
Tom Floyd, Composer
Tom Floyd is a composer, conductor and producer who works in a variety of music environments. Most associated with writing for voice and the stage, Tom’s recent opera commissions include Veritable Michael (Shadow Opera), The Day Dawns (Royal Opera House Youth Opera Company), and Snow (The Opera Story), described by The Guardian as “strong and absorbing”.
Beyond opera, Tom’s major commissions include Ulalume (St John’s Hyde Park, English Heritage Lottery), an organ concerto written for the internationally renowned organist, James O’Donnell.
As a conductor Tom has led projects with the Britten Sinfonia, Britten Sinfonia Academy, Into Opera, Royal Opera House Youth Opera Company, and Shadow Opera. He is also the Musical Director of the Royal Greenwich and Blackheath Halls Youth Choir.
Tom founded Shadow Opera, an opera collective specialising in innovative music theatre, and is the company’s Artistic Director. Recent productions include Veritable Michael — a podcast opera and Stop All the Clocks, a live music, film and cabaret installation.
Tom works extensively in music education, passionately believing in the power of widening young people’s access to inspirational music making, and leads the Royal Opera House’s Create and Sing national programme.
Anna Rose-Prynn, Librettist
Anna has lived, walked and swum in Dorset for twenty years, absorbing its history and stories, observing its landscape and nature.
She has written for most of her life but The Stones Sing comprise her first librettos. Studying early Celtic literature at Cambridge enhanced a fascination with myth, legend and oral tradition and she has taken part in live storytelling events with among others Narativ and Bridport Women’s Creative Collective. She has performed her poetry live and it has been published by Dark Mountain.
At 18 (as Anna Wheatley) she was a winner of the Observer/Royal Court Young Writers’ Festival - in which her play Covehithe was performed. She went on to have 11 plays produced including Water and the Source (BBC radio), Tasting of Earth (directed by Sam Mendes), and Water Hunters, a blend of music, dance and spoken word about the myths and realities of east coast fishing communities. This developed into an interest in the potential of opera as storytelling.
Much of her work is informed by the climate crisis and the loss of nature and species. She is an environmental activist and speaker/educator for Extinction Rebellion.
She is currently working on a book, Outshift, a fusion of memoir and nature writing.
Board of Trustees
Ben Bowe
After studying Classics and Law at Oxford, Ben trained at a leading City accountancy firm and then escaped to the country (before it was fashionable!) to continue his career. He set up his own practice in Somerset and now advises a wide range of clients locally, nationally and internationally. He has worked in a voluntary capacity for a number of charities and for many years was County Treasurer of St John Ambulance, for which service he was granted the honour of Officer of the Order of St John. Having lived in a rural community for many years he is well aware of the difficulties of accessing professional music performances and, being surrounded by singers in his family, he is unable to ignore the importance of music in his life and theirs.
Bridget Escolme
Bridget Escolme is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Queen Mary University of London, UK. She teaches and researches early modern drama in performance, costume history, and creative arts and mental health. Her publications include Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (2005); Shakespeare Handbooks: Antony and Cleopatra (2006); and Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage (2014). She is co-convener of Queen Mary’s MSc in Creative Arts and Mental Health, a collaboration between the Department of Drama and the Centre for Psychiatry at Queen Mary.
Michelle Williams
Vacancies
We are not advertising for any positions at the moment, but if you are interested in joining us, whether as a trustee, volunteer, member of staff, or creative: we’d love to hear from you.