Two Music Theatre Wales commissions win awards in one week

Two works commissioned by Music Theatre Wales have won awards this week:

The Jollof House Party Opera by Tumi Wiliams and Sita Thomas
AMAZON by Alex Ho and Elayce Ismail

The Jollof House Party Opera has won the Celtic Film Award, a Special Award given to a film created in any of the Celtic nations, at the FOCUS Wales 2022 Film Festival. The opera was one of three innovative digital works commissioned through MTW’s new programme – New Directions – developing new opera with Global Majority artists, refreshing and revitalising opera and reaching out to new audiences. The Jollof House Party Opera was shown at the FOCUS Festival in Wrexham on 6th May.

You can see The Jollof House Party Opera here: https://musictheatre.wales/productions/the-house-of-jollof-opera.html

New Directions is led by MTW Artistic Associate Elayce Ismail and Director Michael McCarthy: https://musictheatre.wales/productions/new-directions.html

AMAZON was the first digital work created by Music Theatre Wales at the start of lockdown. MTW was invited by HOME in Manchester to create a short digital piece for their series Homemakers. MTW invited composer Alex Ho and theatre maker Elayce Ismail to collaborate, even though they had never met and would only be able to work remotely. The resulting piece AMAZON took an original view on the global impact of our consumerist world and a highly innovative approach to making music theatre. C0-commissioned with the London Sinfonietta in July 2020 and released a few months later, MTW was delighted to hear Radio 3 announce this week that Alex Ho has been awarded the Young Talent (composer) award by the Critics Circle, with AMAZON cited by the judges as a major part of their reason for making the award “one of the most original multi-media works to come out of lockdown” https://criticscircle.org.uk/music-section-awards-2020-21/

You can see AMAZON here: https://londonsinfonietta.org.uk/channel/video/digital-works-amazon-alex-ho-and-elayce-ismail