MTW will be working in RCT from September 2024 to September 2025, exploring opera as storytelling in music, and as an expressive form for anyone and everyone.

There are three strands to our work over this year:

Future Directions RCT

Future Directions is a young people’s programme which brings together neurotypical and neurodivergent, learning disabled and autistic people aged 16 to 25. It is an invitation to create storytelling in music and to make a new digital opera which will be presented as a MTW production on our website and showcased in a live concert at the Parc and Dare!

The process includes two 3-day residencies in February and May 2025. Come along, find out more and meet members of the creative team at our free “taster” workshops which take place around RCT in Autumn 2024. For details see here and to read more about how our Future Directions programme works, visit its dedicated page here.

New Notes: RCT young music-creators programme

A new young composer and music-creator scheme in collaboration with Sinfonia Cymru for young people across RCT age 14 to 18.

Do you want to explore creating music that will be workshopped, recorded and performed live for musicians from Sinfonia Cymru? Are you a teacher or young project leader looking for an exciting and creative music making opportunity for the young people you support? Then come along to an open and free introductory workshop taking place on 3^rd October at Gartholwg Lifelong Learning Centre in Church Village. Full details of this exciting new scheme can be found here.

The Echoes Return Slow

Performance of a new music and video piece by Welsh composer Luke Lewis. Building from recorded interviews from the 1950s with miners in Treorchy and extracts from one of the earliest feminist films “The Women of the Rhondda” from the 1960s reflecting on life in the valley as it was then, this new work also raises some questions about life now. As the Echoes Return to the very place they were originally recorded, this is an opportunity to reflect on our identity now. This MTW production will be performed by Sinfonia Cymru and conducted by Iwan Teifion Davies, with video design created by Simon Clode and including sound design by Luke Lewis.

The culmination event

We will bring all three strands together in a public performance at the Parc and Dare in Treorchy on 11 September 2025, performing the new pieces by the young composers, showing the new digital opera created locally by the RCT Future Directions company on the large screen, and performing The Echoes Return Slow.

We very much hope this event will ignite some lively discussions and inspire future storytelling in music projects within RCT, using opera to say something about who we are in 2025.