Hera
Hera is an intersectional feminist opera company. We share music and stories you haven’t heard before online and on tour. We made our first show, ‘Generation’ in autumn 2019. Since 2020 we’ve been focussed on online work that’s accessible for us and for audiences, including two short online works, ‘Sleeping and Waking are their Names’ and ‘Response’ and ‘We Ask These Questions of Everybody’, seen first at Sound Festival in February 2021. In 2023, our new show ‘Out of Her Mouth’, a co-production with Dunedin Consort and Mahogany Opera Group, will tour live and be released online, and a new digital R&D commission from The Space will see the release of ‘Houseplants’ an online photo-opera project about people and their plants. Find out more about us at www.wearehera.co.uk
Amble Skuse
Amble Skuse is a musician and artist, working with found sound, voices, electronic processing, and site specific locations. She works with oral history archives, interviews, community memories, radio interviews, found sounds and site specific compositions to explore myriad identities in myriad locations.
She explores these ideas of identity and power through a lens of intersectional feminism. Her focus is on gender and disability, and she is currently studying for a PhD looking at ways in which a disabled composer / performer can utilise technology as a tool for composing, improvising and performing.
Her work has been featured on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, and has taken her across the world, from Edinburgh to Singapore on a 10,000 mile train journey, to Canada to develop an improvising platform with disabled musicians, to China to explore the role of ‘being’ in improvisation, to Croatia to perform with the female coding ensemble OFFAL. She is a Creative Entrepreneurs Fellow and a BBC Performing Arts Fellow. She holds an AHRC scholarship for her research.
Toria Banks
Toria Banks is a disabled director, writer and producer, and joint Artistic Director of Hera. For Hera she has also: written the script for gig theatre show ‘Generation’ (2019); written and directed a short video opera, ‘Sleeping and Waking are Their Names’. Currently she is working on ‘Out of Her Mouth’ a new English version of biblical cantatas by French baroque composer Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre for a tour in 2023. She has worked for the Royal Opera House and English Touring Opera as a staff director, and taught acting including at Trinity Laban and Arts Educational Schools. She has also written three plays for Scottish touring, (“Funny, observant, full of humanity” Aberdeen Press and Journal).
Victoria Oruwari
Acclaimed Soprano Victoria Oruwari is a London-based Nigerian-born singer whose versatile repertoire covers art songs, operatic arias and musical theatre. She acquired her Bachelor of Music degree and postgraduate diploma in Voice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance graduating with distinction.
Victoria has performed in several productions with British ParaOrchestra including Will Gregory’s The Nature of Why; Minimalism changed my life; Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs; and Hannah Peel’s The Unfolding in 2022. Stage roles include: Mother in the Royal Opera House and Candoco’s production of Shaun Tann’s The Lost thing; Angel in Michael Kenny’s This Is Not for You, and Mrs. Peachum in Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (both for Graeae). Her life and music has been a subject of two TV documentaries, The Soprano’s Colourful Sounds and Victoria’s Kiwi Adventure (Attitude TV New Zealand). She also featured in Braille Music, a documentary by Michael House in celebration of Louis Braille, and presented Music’s Inner Vision for BBC Radio 3.
Steph West
Harper and singer, Steph West works as a performer, music creator, teacher and workshop leader. Starting out as a classical musician, Steph became an English and Irish trad harp specialist (via an early music degree and a liking for jazz). Now, she also performs as a singer-songwriter and is involved in contemporary projects pushing the boundaries for the lever harp.
A harpist with a congenital hand difference, Steph has been invited to work with the ParaOrchestra and RNS Moves, including collaborations with Mayk, Extraordinary Bodies, Candoco and the CBSO as well as trips to Bahrain, Qatar, Perth Australia and a televised performance for the Queen's Speech in 2013. Steph also worked as a mentor for disabled led youth music organisation Open Up Music, who launched the National Open Youth Orchestra in 2018.
Back home in Oxford, Steph works with Paul Rademeyer exploring the world of voice, electroharp and drums and loop pedals. Keeping her folk roots alive, Steph plays with fiddle player Matt Coatsworth (Boldwood) in duo First Folio, reimagining early English dance tunes. She also teaches the annual folk harp weekend at Halsway Manor, supports the young harpers at London Irish Music School and also calls the odd ceilidh.
Sonia Allori
Sonia Allori is a composer, performer, researcher, and community music therapist based in the Scottish Highlands. She has a Phd in composition from Edinburgh Napier University. Recent commissions are F-email – Rarescale at Angel Field Festival (2021); Songs in isolation – Disability Arts Online (2021); Curious-er (shortlisted for a Scottish New Music Award 2021) – Drake Music (2020); Concentric Circles– written as part of Ben Lunn’s Sign Cycle (2019); Memorial to an important lace shirt – Exploding Collage/Hatton Gallery (2018); and Last Tango in Liverpool – Drake Music & DadaFest (2018).
In 2019 she was a Music Fellow in Learning & Participation at Trinity Laban, performed in “Sound Symphony” (IAP/ Oily Cart) and “The Lost Thing” (Royal Opera House/ Candoco). Sonia was Artist in Residence with Drake Music in 2020 and is currently Development Artist with Sonic Bothy where she co-performed and co-composed the collaborative work Verbaaaaatim for Tectonics Festival (2021). She is currently a part-time researcher at RCS exploring D/deaf performance and the intersection of Deaf Studies with Performance Studies.
Clarence Adoo
Clarence Adoo grew up with his siblings in a Christian foster family in Essex, where he demonstrated a great interest in music. At the age of six, he joined the young people's Salvation Army band where he began to learn to play the cornet.He went on to study Trumpet at the Royal College of Music, London resulting in a freelance career playing different genres from pop, jazz (with Courtney Pine and the Jazz Warriors), to classical. In 1992, Clarence moved to Newcastle to take up a contract with Royal Northern Sinfonia.
In 1995 however, Clarence was in a tragic car accident which left him paralysed from the neck down and unable to continue his full time professional career in music. Following the accident he received little funding to help him restart his life as a paralysed man. Clarence appeared in the Queen's New Year's Honours list in 2012 and received an MBE for his contributions to music. In 2012, Clarence also played alongside the British Paraorchestra and Friends in the Paralympic closing ceremony alongside Coldplay. Clarence is very active in the North East assisting others with disability. He was a key consultant for disabled people in the design for SAGE, Gateshead. Clarence is currently an ambassador for the National Youth Brass Band of Great Britain. He is also currently on the advisory panel for Live Music Now.
Laura Spark
Laura Spark applies mixed media animation across theatre, installation and film, veering from the symbolic and elated, the haunting and visceral, to the playful and inclusive. She happily flits from making short films informed by folk practice and mythology to eclectic collaborations with other artists and local communities to help bring their stories to life.
Since graduating from The Royal College of Art with a Masters in Animation, Laura has created content for numerous art and theatre projects, directed music videos and worked with local community projects. Her short films have played in international festivals including Frightfest and London Short Film Festival in the UK, to Stoptrik, Slovenia; and Women in Horror, USA.
As an artist Laura has won commissions from York Mediale, participated in Flatpack Film Festival's artist development programme Waveform, funded by Jerwood Arts.