“… when all words fail, music speaks.” Aussie Theatre on Speechless.

Speechless presents, and is composer and devisor Cat Hope’s personal response to, the issue of voicelessness in society, and being silenced by legal, political or cultural means. For Cat, Speechless was a vehicle to address this through music. As Cat says “I started to question what I could possibly do, as an artist, in the face of these issues. I believe music can be a conduit for contemplating difficult subjects, responding to them in a different way than a news report, overcoming the communication limits and barriers of words or the cold realism of a photograph.”

As a reflection of this, Speechless will be supporting the following charities during the Perth Festival season:

Amnesty International

We call out injustice, wherever it happens, and work together with people just like you to stand for human dignity- we believe that together, we can create a world where the most basic human rights are enjoyed by all.

action.amnesty.org.au

The Centre for Asylum Seekers, Refugees and Detainees (CARAD)

The Centre for Asylum Seekers, Refugees and Detainees (CARAD) is an independent, not-for-profit organization that represents a community of people who support the rights of asylum seekers, refugees and detainees in Western Australia.

carad.org.au

Enhance your experience of Speechless with two opportunities to get in conversation.

hall of the Sunset Heritage Precinct, focusing on the wider issues that Speechless presents around voicelessness in society. This will be introduced by Perth Festival Artistic Director Wendy Martin, and hosted by Terri Ann White, and features composer Cat Hope, social justice lawyer Melissa Parke and Amnesty International Regional Campaign Organiser for My New Neighbour, Claire Birch. Don’t miss out on this one, tickets for Speechless are moving quickly.

On Saturday 2 March there will also be a post-show conversation with Composer & Director Cat Hope.

Otherwise, there are plenty of chances to debrief the show in the Sunset Bar, onsite at the Sunset Heritage Precinct, open before the performance from 7pm, and again afterwards until 10:30pm.

Looking for something to do before and after Speechless?

The on-site Sunset Bar at the Sunset Heritage Precinct will be open from 7pm before each performance, 26 Feb – 3 Mar, and then again after the show until 10:30pm.

We’re also excited to announce that the renowned Cullen Wines in Wilyabrup is supporting Speechless, and will be served at the bar.

Cat Hope’s contemporary opera Speechless uses animated graphic notation. Graphic notation is the representation of music through the use of visual symbols in place of traditional music notation. It is then put in motion, making it animated.

The graphic score is read in performance on synchronised iPads, using the Decibel ScorePlayer application. The score ‘image’ is over thirty meters long, but the iPad provides a window to the score as it scrolls the past a vertical playhead, the point where the musicians read the score. Below is a screenshot of one moment for the 30-piece multi-instrumental Australian Bass Orchestra:

All of the elements of the Speechless score are derived from the Human Rights Commission report, “The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention” (2014). The design of the notation is derived from materials in the report: graphs, children’s drawings, photographs and even the graphic layout of the document. The colours are also sampled from the report.

The colours for the orchestral parts come from the children’s drawings, and the vocal parts use colours from the photographs in the report. There are no words in the opera.

For composer and director Cat Hope, the graphic notation is a key aspect of the work “I like to think that the orchestra and singers are ‘re-reading’ the report, re-defining the idea of a conventional libretto.”

Music Director Aaron Wyatt gives an insight into how animated graphic notation works in the video below.

The newest arts venue in Perth has a long history with abandonment and ‘voiceless-ness’.

First established in 1904 as Claremont Old Men’s Home, Sunset Hospital, renamed in 1943, was built as a hospital and an aged-care facility, to house men who were unable to support themselves in their old age, often agricultural and pastoral workers, gold prospectors or former convicts.

Overlooking the Swan River, mid-way between Perth and Fremantle, Sunset offered respite to those without family or care, much to the consternation of its neighbours. The site consists of original hospital wards, mortuary, kitchen, and an infirmary, built out of limestone blocks.

The Sunset Heritage Precinct was heritage listed in 1997 and has recently commenced a full restoration.

Speechless

The world premiere of Cat Hope’s opera Speechless, 26 Feb – 3 Mar, will take over the Sunset Heritage Precinct as part of the 2019 Perth Festival, filling every corner of the old hall with the multi-instrumental 30-piece Australian Bass Orchestra, a choir of 30 community singers, and four of Australia’s most versatile soloists.

Speechless is a contemporary opera created as a personal response to the 2014 Australian Human Rights Commission report ‘The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention’. Through a vocal language beyond words, Speechless is Hope’s musical exploration of the impact on those rendered speechless through political means.

Speechless reimagines the space in a new way – transforming a derelict old men’s home, into a creative hub, exploring notions of voicelessness and displacement, and offering music as a way to grapple with complex, difficult problems. As composer Cat Hope says “We all love music – it has an incredible abstract power that we often respond to emotionally – I want to see if I can leverage that to help us consider dilemmas in a new way, and reinforce qualities of empathy, participation and elation.”

Sunset hall where the world premiere season of Speechless takes place.

SPEECHLESS

26 FEB – 3 MAR 2019
SUNSET HERITAGE PRECINCT
$25-$49 (+BF) TICKETS

This 2019 Perth Festival World Premiere season is designed specifically for the new Sunset Heritage Arts Precinct.

Find out more about Speechless and book tickets now from Perth Festival.

Tura has partnered with Scoop to bring the latest in new music and the sonic arts to your inboxes. As WA’s comprehensive guide for ‘what’s on’, Scoop’s mission is to develop Perth and WA as a hub for arts, events, culture and travel. Scoop boasts a sophisticated, bilingual website showcasing hundreds of events in and around WA. As a community-based platform, Scoop offers free event listings and the unique opportunity to reach a large audience of over 65,000 active users.

Never miss a beat on what’s on in and around WA with the Scoop newsletter, sign up here.

scoop.com.au

Premiering at the 2019 Perth Festival, Speechless will be brought to life by four brilliant and versatile soloists. With four very different vocal styles, the opera features one of Australia’s finest interpreters of contemporary operatic repertoire Judith Dodsworth, lead singer of the Australian heavy metal powerhouse High Tension, Karina Utomo, Western Australian experimental vocalist Sage Pbbbt and Persian vocal trailblazer Tara Tiba.

Composer and director Cat Hope says “it is important to me that a contemporary opera represents more styles of music than the classical genre of which it grew. Judith is an operatic voice, Karina comes from a heavy metal background, Tara is an Iranian classical singer who studies jazz, and Sage is an improvisor influenced by a wide range of practices. The musical director, Aaron Wyatt, is a Noongar man – it was important that an Australian Indigenous person took a leadership role in the rendering of the work.

Meet the soloists, and then see them in action 26 February to 3 March at the newest arts venue in Perth, the Sunset Heritage Precinct – don’t miss out on this one.

Speechless Artists

Presented by STRUT, in association with Tura, as part of the 2019 Perth Festival, Maxine Doyle’s visceral site-specific dance-theatre work Sunset will feature an original sound score by renowned WA composer and sound designer Rachael Dease.

Known for her award-winning song cycles City of Shadows and From A Small Distant World, and as a formidable front woman, Dease returns to the live string quartet in combination with her immersive sound design and live vocals. Her haunting and uplifting sound score will be heard throughout the rooms and hall of the Sunset Heritage Precinct as the performers move through the space, guiding the audience in a truly immersive visual and sonic experience.

The new original score has been made possible by Tura, with support from The Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding advisory body.

Tura would also like to acknowledge donors to the Sound Connections philanthropic campaign for their generous contribution to this project.

SUNSET

7 FEB – 17 FEB 2019
SUNSET HERITAGE PRECINCT
$25-$65 (+BF) TICKETS

Leave your comfort zone and enter a mysterious world where you wander with the spirits of Perth’s colourful past. Discover forgotten secrets in the dusty shadows of one of our city’s most intriguing and significant heritage sites – Sunset down by the iconic Swan River.

From the renowned UK director-choreographer Maxine Doyle (co-director of Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man, Sleep No More) comes a visceral dance-theatre performance that is epic in reach but intimate in experience. Inspired by the riverside precinct’s rich and unique history and the bushland that surrounds it, a stunning team of Australian creatives, including the indomitable Racheal Dease, transform the former Sunset Old Men’s Home into a waiting room between worlds, where classical myth collides with WA stories and local heroes can waltz with gods.

Find out more about Sunset and book tickets now from Perth Festival.

Production Partners
STRUT Dance
Perth Festival

A Perth Festival co-commission and world premiere.

Image by Simon Pynt.

In February 2019 Tura will be producing and presenting the 2019 Perth Festival World Premiere season of award-winning composer Cat Hope’s wordless opera, Speechless.

Speechless is a personal response to the 2014 Human Rights Commission report ‘The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention’. Through a vocal language beyond words, Speechless is a channel for Hope to come to terms with the things she sees perpetrated in her name by those in positions of power.

Cat says of the project that “this is a project that had a philosophical birth rather than a musical one… I wanted to put on the record the way I felt about certain things, and I realised that the grand form of opera was the only way for this philosophical thing to come in.”

“Speechless is a wordless opera, that is driven by thematic materials form the Human Rights Commissions children in detentions report that was tabled by Gillian Triggs in 2014. I think that was my year of realising that things were not quite right. Both when it came to women’s position or opportunities in Australia but also a feeling of disempowerment generated by some of the things that were happening in our government, particularly around asylum seekers and children in detention. I felt helpless in the face of these things – what could I offer as an experimental music composer? Some friends encouraged me to try and address my response through my work. The first attempt was After Julia (about Julia Gillard’s term in office), and Speechless was the next. Speechless is an hour long, and features four soloists, community choirs, and the Australian Bass Orchestra – an orchestra of instruments all playing below middle C.

My notation leaves some choices to the musicians, but strictly dictates other things to them. Whilst Speechless is my own personal response to this problem, I want to be clear that I’m not trying to speak on the behalf of anyone, so I’m really keen that the orchestra, the choir and the singers are a part of the process of the project, they have a quite a significant contribution to the makeup of this piece.

When people know what the work is about and have the context, it can be a very moving experience.

And like all opera, it deals with the big issues of our time. It’s a large form project with an opportunity to make something, I hope, significant to music more broadly.”

SPEECHLESS

26 FEB – 3 MAR 2019
SUNSET HERITAGE PRECINCT
$25-$49 (+BF) TICKETS

Speechless features one of Australia’s finest interpreters of contemporary operatic repertoire Judith Dodsworth, lead singer of the Australian heavy metal powerhouse High Tension, Karina Utomo, Western Australian experimental vocalist Sage Pbbbt and Persian vocal trailblazer Tara Tiba, with a combined community choir of 30 voices, and the 30-piece multi-instrumental Australian Bass Orchestra.

This 2019 Perth Festival World Premiere season is designed specifically for the new Sunset Heritage Arts Precinct.

Find out more about Speechless and book tickets now from Perth Festival.

Production Partners
Perth Festival
Monash University

A huge thanks from Tura to all of our supporters, contributors and artists.

2018 has been one of our biggest year’s yet, Tura undertook two national tours, three Artist in Residencies in the remote communities of Warmun (East Kimberley) and Fitzroy Crossing (Kimberley), produced two major regional and remote tours, travelling to eight remote communities and six regional centres throughout the Kimberley and Pilbara, as well as our annual program of concerts, installations and events.

Highlights of 2018 include The Summers Night Project, with three young women composers who were mentored by acclaimed composers to create three new works that were toured to Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide, the week-long Residency with Ensemble Offspring with concerts in Perth and Albany and a workshop with young and emerging composers, and the sold-out Kimberley Echoes Tour, that delivered concerts and schools workshops in Darwin, the Kimberley and the Pilbara.

With critically acclaimed projects across WA and Australia, this year has offered a diverse and broad program of innovative and ear-opening experiences.

2018 saw the start of the Kimberley Indonesia Project with Indonesian artist Ubiet Raseuki travelling to Broome and the peninsula to collaborate with local Indigenous artists. The iMprov Program developed further with artist workshops, inviting local, national and international artists to work alongside young and emerging Perth composers in an open and experimental space.

We were proud to be the recipient of the APRA AMCOS | AMC Art Music Award for Excellence by an Organisation for our 30 year contribution to Australian sound art. And we were pleased to welcome our new Patron of the Tura Regional Program, Wayne Martin AC QC.

Tura looks forward to presenting the world premiere of Cat Hope’s new experimental opera, Speechless, at the 2019 Perth Festival, paying homage to those rendered speechless through political means. Speechless has been designed specifically for the new Sunset Heritage Arts Precinct – BOOK NOW.

The Tura office will be closed from 21 December to 2 January, but we look forward to seeing you in the new year at one of our events soon.

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