We are working with Infinite Opera across 2025-26 on a community engagement commission for Digbeth’s new BBC HQ, The Tea Factory.
Infinite Opera workshop at May Digbeth First Friday 2025. Image by Nina Baillie.
Throughout 2025-26, Birmingham-based opera creation company Infinite Opera (Roxanne Korda & Daniel Blanco Albert) will build an innovative performance-installation.
Based on the narratives of local residents and workers, and the heritage of Digbeth, Infinite Opera will run performative and creative wellbeing workshops and a series of 1-1 interviews with local business owners, to ask how business owners and workers feel connected to Digbeth as a changing landscape.
The first of these workshops took place at Grand Union as part of May 2025 Digbeth First Friday, bringing together some initial exploratory Digbeth-inspired bits of song and poetry, as well as some excerpts of Infinite Opera’s previous work ‘[shut]’. These worked as a stimulus to spark honest conversations about the area and the different cyclical processes of change that have happened in the past, and that are happening now.
Across Autumn and Winter of 2025 further workshops will be taking place in the lead up to the final operatic work in the summer 2026. Infinite Opera want to keep this discussion open to everybody that engages with Digbeth in any manner, willing to inform the development of their new work in the most empathetic, inclusive, equitable, and collective way as possible. You can drop in and enjoy workshops as a one-off, or use them as a starting point to get involved with the long-term project! If you are interested in participating, please let anybody from Infinite Opera or Grand Union know.
About the Artist
Infinite OperaOpen accordion
Infinite Opera is an innovative small-size experimental opera creation company based in Birmingham founded by Roxanne Korda and Daniel Blanco Albert. They are the proud creators of the first ever Beer Opera and many science-related works. They are interested in subverting the traditional genre by collaborating with businesses, institutions and professionals from different practices.
Roxanne KordaOpen accordion
Roxanne is an opera singer and librettist. She likes to explore; presenting new opera, on esoteric subject matter, in unique spaces, to different audiences. She co-founded the company Infinite Opera in order to combine her love of science, philosophy and music.
She is currently enrolled on practice-based PhD with the Midland4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, exploring how to use science in creating new operatic characters and narrative. She has a MMus in Vocal Performance (Distinction) from RBC, and previously studied Physics and Philosophy BSc.
She is a varied performer whose previous roles and concerts include classical (Norina – Don Pasquale, Fiordiligi – Cosi Fan Tutte) to romantic (Vier Letzte Lieder, Rosalinda – Die Fledermaus) to contemporary (Entropy – Entanglement! An Entropic tale). Her libretti include Besse: Water, Rye and Hops, and Entanglement: An Entropic Tale.
Daniel Blanco AlbertOpen accordion
Daniel is a composer and conductor. He is Infinite Opera’s co-artistic director and resident composer, for which he has written the music of the physics dissemination opera ‘Entanglement! An Entropic Tale’, the operatic beer trilogy, ‘Besse’, the folk masquerade ‘Autohoodening: The Rise of Captain Swing’, and the planetarium opera ‘The Flowering Desert’.
He has also worked for theatrical productions and artistic installations across Europe, collaborating with directors such as Aleksandar Dundjerovic, Stephen Simms or Lise Olson. He often collaborates with the Welsh National Opera’s engagement programme in the Midlands.
Daniel studied Composition in Spain and in the UK, getting the Extraordinary Prize at Valencia Conservatoire and a BMus (First) and Masters (Distinction) at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (funded with a Leverhulme Arts Scholarship). He is currently pursuing a PhD in Performing Arts at Birmingham City University.
Infinite Opera Performance for ‘drye eyes’
1 March 2019
May Digbeth First Friday: Operatic-theatre making workshops with Infinite Opera
Grand Union Gallery2 May 20255–6pm; 6.30–7.30pm
Besse: Part 1, Water
8 March 2019
Besse: Part 2, Hops
12 April 2019