Le violette

Director and writer Laura Attridge is fast establishing herself as a dynamic new voice in opera. Her directing credits to date include productions for English Touring Opera, Buxton International Festival, Waterperry Opera Festival, Vache Baroque Festival, Trinity Laban Conservatoire, and Hampstead Garden Opera, while as a librettist she has been commissioned by companies such as the Royal Opera House, Glyndebourne, Scottish Opera, English Touring Opera, Lammermuir Festival, Sound Festival, and Leeds Youth Opera.

Here are highlights from Laura’s conversation with The Enormity of Now.

Who are you and what do you do?
I am a maker of opera and of live performance, and a teller of stories. I’m a writer and director.

How did you get here?
I got here by combining as many of the things I love into one career path. I followed lots of them separately, these threads of singing, music-making, musicianship, performing (both as an actor and singer), directing (which I started to do at school), and writing. I found myself at a point, where all these threads came together.

I still think of myself as a musician. I forget sometimes that it’s at the core of who I am. It’s something I take for granted. I’ve always been a good musician and have always enjoyed making music. I feel that it’s something that many librettists and directors don’t have available to them. I’m so used to it being part of me that I think everyone can do this – but they can’t.

It’s a complex relationship – part of the reason I haven’t done much singing after I stopped. I got to a point in my training where I was singing the best I had ever sung. But that wasn’t the best I would ever sing if I continued training. I was at the peak of this athletic pursuit. What’s been difficult is the loss of that muscle build-up, technique, in the years since.

Signing up for a project like this makes me very nervous because I can’t sing like that anymore. I just don’t have the muscles, it takes a long time to build back up, as well as knowing how to use them. I did a lot of choral singing in my teens (not church) and I miss music-making in that sense. I miss recital singing. I miss aspects of it but I don’t day to day say, “God, I miss singing.”

How has the journey of your art/career engaged your voice – personally, artistically, politically?
What I love about where I’ve come from and where I’m going is that my understanding that my voice keeps growing, keeps developing. I love that my relationship with my voice is complex and never constant.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what are the unique things that I can offer the world. I’ve just finished some workshops for singers, really introducing them to their strength and uniqueness, which many of them simply hadn’t thought about before. That’s a real focus for me now, and it’s a privilege to explore that. It’s part of why I moved away from being a singer. I wasn’t encouraged to do that, and I wasn’t moving into a career where I was encouraged to do that. I wanted to be in a position where I had a voice and that did not get in the way of my career. Politically, that’s part of it because I want to be able to speak out and call into question practices, ideas, and things in the industry and world that I want to improve. I’ll get on my soapbox at the drop of a hat. I spent my conservatoire year with people telling me to turn my brain off.

So much of what I do is about exploring my voice. I write for the voice – even poetry is written to be spoken out loud. I try to empower others to have a voice.

What is the voice that you found while finding your voice?
It’s not something I can pin down now. It’s something that continues to grow and that’s what I love about it. I know I will be a stronger and more complex artist and have a more complex voice the day after that, and the day after that. My perspective will shift and my ideas will shift and I’ll be more and better. There’s strength in a voice that is flexible and willing to grow and seeking actively to develop. I’m more willing every day to accept that it is an ongoing journey, recognizing how glorious that is. I’ll never get to a place where I say, “Great, that’s my voice!