For October’s Digbeth First Friday, you are invited to two performative co-creation workshops with Infinite Opera exploring the past, present, and future cultural heritage of Digbeth at Grand Union Gallery. These workshops will help to inform Infinite Opera’s upcoming operatic endeavor for summer 2026, an ambitious multi-site community performance marking the redevelopment of the Typhoo factory.
Workshop 1 – 6.00-6.45pm
Workshop 2 – 7.15-8.00pm
Infinite Opera have been speaking to Digbeth’s day and night working force. They have gathered informal impressions of the current state of the area and discussed transience, nostalgia, and present and future worries and hopes. 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 this session as a one-off, or use it as a starting point to get involved with the long-term project!
Librettist and singer Roxanne Korda, alongside pianist Melissa Morris, will perform some initial exploratory Digbeth-inspired bits of song and poetry. These will work as a stimulus to spark honest conversations about the area and the different cyclical processes of change that happened in the past, and that are happening right now.
This is an opera-making workshop. Participating in it means that anything said or discussed may be used by Infinite Opera as inspiration in the making of the new work. For ethical reasons they will not use any real names, stories or direct transcriptions of anything discussed in the workshop in the piece. Infinite Opera want primarily to create an open space for discussion. All the participants in the workshop will be credited in the piece. Taking part in the workshop means you consent to this.
This workshop will kickstart a series of opera-theatre making workshops throughout 2025 and 2026 in the lead up to the final operatic work in the summer 2026. If you are interested in participating, please let anybody from Infinite Opera or Grand Union know.
