We are working with Birmingham-based opera creation company Infinite Opera (Roxanne Korda & Daniel Blanco Albert) 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.
Commissioned by Stoford and Grand Union, ‘Open for Business’ explores the conditions of regeneration, its tensions, impacts, ecologies, communities and histories whilst also speculating on its future.
Infinite Opera’s work is hyper-immersive and subject-specific, presenting experiences that actively engage creative teams, local stakeholders, and audiences. Bringing operatic ambition to different forms of music and theatre, ranging from folk to experimental practices.
Engaging with the term ‘infinite’ from its beginnings, broadly understanding the concept ‘opera’ as an evolving and relevant artform, the term ‘infinite’ reflects their approach to performance making. Evoking a constant re-engagement with changing realities, and placing the audience as an active participant, their practice is interdisciplinary and collaborative.
This process underpins how ‘Open for Business’ has formed, addressing the often-hidden stories and experiences of lost businesses and local communities in the frequently experienced economic shifts such as gentrification and regeneration, through the creation of a participatory operatic theatre project from the heart of Digbeth, Birmingham.
Based on the narratives of local residents and workers, and the heritage of Digbeth, Infinite Opera have been running performative and creative wellbeing workshops and a series of 1-1 interviews with local business owners, asking how business owners and workers feel connected to the 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 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.
Further workshops were held across Autumn and Winter 2025, exploring different aspects of performance making such as costume, character development, and writing workshops. This work has continued throughout the Spring and Summer of 2026 as Infinite Opera has grown an ambitious Chorus of singers and musicians, who will support the final operatic work in August 2026.
Infinite Opera explore how artists and creatives, as long-term thinkers and reflective practitioners, can help unify the communities who become adrift, and engage in a grieving process for lost lifestyles and workplaces through performance, action, and presentation. By understanding the sense of belonging local communities and stakeholders have to city landscapes, and their cultural and industrial heritage, they have created a collaborative work that empowers communities to share their voices.
Supported by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and nine partner venues across the area, ‘Open for Business’ will feature four fictional characters built from conversations with local workers and residents. The audience will see snapshots from a year in their lives, whilst their connection to Digbeth shifts and develops through past, present and future simulations.
‘Open for Business’ will take place twice on Sunday 30 August, at 2pm and 6pm. Each performance will be two hours in length and will involve moving between various venues in Digbeth.
Opera Making Workshop with Infinite Opera for October Digbeth Friday Friday, 2025. Grand Union, Birmingham.
We were first introduced to Infinite Opera’s practice in 2018 as part of our annual BCU graduate residency programme. During this time the duo developed a subject/ site-specific performance with Digbrew Co., focusing on the lost heritage of the brewster, as well as an operatic performative response to the exhibition ‘Drye Eyes’ (Lauren Gault) in the Grand Union gallery.
Since then Infinite Opera have continued to work with different stakeholders including: Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Post Workers Theatre (GMB Union), UoB’s Astrophysics Department and the ThinkTank Planetarium, or Birmingham Opera Company. They have developed a practice in opera co-creation with a range of communities (from young people in disadvantaged backgrounds to refugees) through devising workshops, having worked for Welsh National Opera, Birmingham Rep, Birmingham School of Art (through their Protest Choir), Goldsmiths, or the Birmingham Hippodrome.
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.
The events and workshops taking place as part of this ongoing project are listed below:
May Digbeth First Friday: Operatic-theatre making workshops with Infinite Opera
Grand Union Gallery2 May 20255–6pm; 6.30–7.30pm
October Digbeth First Friday: Operatic-theatre making workshops with Infinite Opera
3 October 20256–8pm
Workshop: Poetry and Libretto Writing with Infinite Opera – Digbeth’s Stories and Imagined Futures
BRIG Cafe24 October 20256–8pmNovember Digbeth First Friday: Operatic-theatre making workshops with Infinite Opera
7 November 20256–8pm
Workshop: Digbeth Characters mask-making with Infinite Opera and Tat Vision
19 November 20256:30–9pmAnd our previous events with Infinite Opera can be found here:
