Project Diary by Fleur Snow (MA Opera Directing)
Week 1: Our first session together consisted of a ‘speed-dating session’ for the opera directors to meet the composers. We each had to bring a story, a sound file and an image and then share our thoughts on them together. Zack and I realised we had actually met before on a National Youth Orchestra of Wales composition residency a few years earlier. This, combined with a similar joy in all things absurd, meant that we got on like a house on fire!
Week 2: This was the point where we started our series of weekly ‘foyer meetings’. For an hour each week, we would have a cup of tea and talk about anything and everything that gave us inspiration. To begin with, we shared our current and previous pieces of work and then made a plan for the following sessions.
Week 3: I decided we should base our conversations around a theme, starting with an idea, coming up with creative responses to it and then seeing where it led us. The first of these was conflict and we had a happy hour dreaming up a 15-minute opera based purely on a conflict between two characters.
Week 4: This week we chose the word ‘romance’, another key operatic theme, and worked from there. We talked about what would happen if romantic characters from different operas were to meet each other in the foyer before each opera began…
Week 5: In our final explorative session, we took the theme of politics and worked out what we would do if presented with this premise for a short opera. This was in the period leading up to the General Election; despite the exercise being an enjoyable one, we decided it was too tense and too variable a theme and left it there!
Week 6: This was the turning point of our whole project. We were invited to a workshop with Mike Pearson from National Theatre Wales, thanks to the support of the Carne Trust. After a presentation which opened all the doors and blew away all the cobwebs from our previous way of visualising theatre, we were given different tasks in our teams to put things into action. During a break in the workshop, Zack and I had another cup of tea (a common theme!) and started joking about an idea for an opera based on the revolving doors in the foyer. Somehow, this idea snow-balled and we had finally found our niche. How to Argue with your Spouse was born! Weeks 7-9: Now that we were in the middle stage of the project, each meeting was spent experimenting with further ideas and plans, now pushing the idea to as absurd an extreme as we could take it, now stripping it back to its bare bones and seeing what was left. We talked about improvisation, different styles, operatic tropes and how to play with them and in general had a lot of fun playing around with different ideas.
Week 10: We had talked a lot, shared a lot of ideas, spent a lot of time drinking tea and wandering around in the park outside, and it was finally time to put pen down to paper and write the libretto. The process was surprisingly painless after nearly three months of preparation, and within the space of a week I had managed to send Zack a shaky but determined first draft.
In fact, it actually turned out to be two libretti – one to be sung out loud, consisting of six words in three pairs of opposites, and the other a silent accompaniment to the action. The revolving doors were the theme of Act 1 (“IN/OUT”), Act 2 took place in and around the lift, (“UP/DOWN”) and Act 3 featured the foyer balcony, (“OVER/UNDER”). Somewhere along the way, we had also acquired a saxophone quartet and a brass band conductor, and these were heavily involved in the action, as was the pianist. Contented with the amount of absurdity and fun we had squeezed into 15 minutes, we sent off the libretto to our tutors Martin Constantine and John Hardy for their permission to progress to the next stage. They liked it too and we were off! 
Weeks 11+: Over the Christmas holiday, Zack took the music away to begin composing and working out how to put our idea into its final, musical form. However, once we had come back to college, we realised that we both weren’t happy with the resolution of the spousal argument and continued to meet each week to discuss what we could do. Firstly, through many cups of tea, we worked out what niggled each of us individually in the ending. From that, we then went back to our initial approach of trying lots of different ideas without committing to any of them initially. Through this freedom, we finally ended up with an ending which worked for both of us and were ready to begin the (sadly unrealised) third phase of rehearsals by the time the Coronavirus pandemic hit.
Tune in to Atmospheres Radio on Sun 3 May 12pm to hear Fleur and Zack's 'How to Argue with your Spouse!'
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