Jerome Whittingham's posts

“We’re playing everything by ear, appropriately enough,” said Russell Plows, Artistic Director of Hull Urban Opera.In this podcast we continue our ad hoc series of lockdown conversations with artists.We find out how Hull Urban Opera has responded to the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, and its restrictions.Podcast: 24 minutes.Russell tells us about how the collective has made best use of lockdown time, some twiddling of thumbs, but also a lot of planning and even creating new works.Violence seems to be the way forward, it seems. Russell delights in revealing something of what the opera has in store ‘on the dark web’, maybe next year. “It’s an exploration of violence as a means of entertainment.”Intriguing. The Hull Urban Opera collective don’t do opera in a stuffy way, and they don’t shy away from contemporary culture and difficult issues.We discuss the collective’s use of technology, and Russell shares some thoughts about online arts encounters he’s enjoyed this year.Russell Plows was talking to HULL IS THI