I’ll be co-creating and performing and clowning and opera-ing in a new piece of performance art music.

her bed // dream wake piece 

 Calla Esperanza (composer) Hannah Calascione (director)

A girl lies in bed, adrift between waking and sleeping. This piece explores self actualisation through voice within the transfem experience.

Calla Esperanza is a musician and cross-arts collaborator currently studying for a masters in composition at Guildhall School of Music and Drama (GSMD). She primarily works with text scores due to their accessibility to performers with different experiences and skillsets; she is excited by the way this openness often expands the work beyond the limitations of her own ideas and breaks down boundaries between composers, performers and audiences. Calla recently collaborated with with choreographer Sophia Morton, working closely with the dancers and, with the help of a dancer-vocalist, developed a piece melding movement and vocalisation. The piece was performed at The Place (December 1st/2nd 2022). In 2018/19, she worked with Hannah Calascione on a play called All the Little Lights. First she created a score that was realised live, using MaxMSP, allowing her to respond to the actors in real time; this version was performed at GSMD. Then she created a fixed media version for a run of the play at Tristan Bates Theatre. For her undergraduate degree, she studied electronic music at GSMD. During that time she founded the Guildhall Experimental Music Society to foster a low stakes environment in which musicians could try out new ideas.

Hannah Calascione is an award-winning director and dramaturg. Her work interrogates the world’s systems, and is usually interdisciplinary, sensory and curious. She holds an MFA in theatre directing from Birkbeck, a BA in anthropology & politics from Cambridge, and a diploma in horticulture. She is currently working on a new show about land ownership, worship, and ecological justice called Green Satanic Thrills, at Camden People’s Theatre. She is also developing a verbatim play, Next of Kin, exploring alternative kinship models in collaboration with the Institute of Womens Health (UCL). Much of her work is music driven. In 2018 she collaborated with Calla Esperanza in her production of All the Little Lights  by Jane Upton, winning an OffWestEnd Award in 2020. She was commissioned by HOME, ¡Viva! Festival 2019 to create Four Seasons of Buenos Aires with Manchester Camerata Orchestra. In 2021 she collaborated with composer Sarah Angliss and Fabula Collective to create a new adaptation of a Japanese play, Camellia. She recently appeared in the chorus of Waste Paper Opera’s Dead Cat Bounce at Somerset House, and is often found in informal choirs and music-making groups. She produces and delivers cross-arts learning programmes, currently at the Barbican Centre and the Roundhouse.