During my year long residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart I created, produced and artistically directed a “mobile” performance piece about food and eating at the Baroque Schloss, in three contrasting 30 minute long pieces. Inspired by the architecture and history of the Schloss I constructed these works around narratives of food and eating., selecting the sites that best aligned with these themes. The performances were “linked” by an improvising Baroque trumpet player Paul Plunkett, acting as a “pied piper” leading the audience from site to site. This project included contributions by other artists resident at the Akademie during the same period.

The pieces were:-

This work revolved around themes of culinary and hunting habits of those inhabiting the Schloss at the time of Charles Eugen, Duke of Wurttemberg, who occupied the castle as his hunting retreat around 1766. I created a graphic score with a different colour representing each of the ten improvising musicians employed for this work. The score was constructed as a time in units of 5 seconds x 12 creating a bar representing one minute. The colours represented duration, volume, density and texture, according to the way they were drawn on the score (eg thinness and thickness suggesting volume, texture suggesting music/sound textures, shape and space suggesting duration and frequency of playing etc, timed by stopwatches. Interspersed were resident artists reading texts I researched about diets and hunting in the Rococo and Baroque periods.

This work centred around the medieval composer Hildegarde’s von Bingen’s invented “secret language” – a hybrid of Latin and German. A highight of this piece was a performance of Hildegarde’s text in sprechstimme by Ute Wasserman, and a duet between Mary Oliver on Hardanger Fele and Stevie Wishart on Hurdy gurdy, in between performance of a vocal ensemble performing Hidegarde’s songs.

This piece reflected my ongoing concerns around the relationship women have to food and eating, having witnessed the devastating impact of Anorexia on my sister in my youth. I interveiwed all the women artists in residency at the Schloss, from different cultures. They were invited to share any anecdotes on their relationship to food and eating. These anecdotes were recorded and became part of a “musique concret” montage of environmental sounds I recorded at the Schloss, which became a “backing track’ for a live performance involving improvising musicians Fred Frith (guitars), Linsay Cooper (bassoon) and myself performing voice and keyboard.

Each performance was “linked” by the Baroque trumpeter, Paul Plunkett, as a roaming “pied piper” who directed the audience to each location.

“The Water Babies” opera for children and adults is the UK/Australian composer  Freddie Hill’s (1948-20243)  wonderful legacy.  In 2016 the Freddie and myself established a new not for profit production company – tomanelli.inc for the sole purpose of the development and production of his opera  based on the children’s classic written by Charles Kingsley in 1863-4. The Water Babies was a tale firmly embedded in Freddie’s childhood, and the opera production gave him the possibility to see his dream come true. The opera combines themes of harsh social realities and inequity during the Industrial Revolution in England and combines them with fantastical themes involving fairies , spirits and alternative realities. The production brought joy to scores of children in the Sydney and outer sydney regions and the rare opportunity to work with professionals in the field.
We performed the opera on three different occasions:-

1) Seymour Centre workshop performance: 2016: MD Rowen Fox
2) Kindlehill School Community Project: 2017: MD Murray Bishop
3) ACA Performance as part of Fringe Kidz: 2019 – The Sydney Fringe Festival: MD David Kram (AOM)

Review by Lyn Lancaster, Sydney Arts Guide