Hummadruz has been supported by the Arts Council of Wales and Welsh Government on a number of innovative projects, collaborating with composer Lenny Sayers and his brilliant ensemble.
The Colour of Music
"The Colour of Music" was a research & development project in January 2020.
The project had a number of aims: using music and visual performance & language as way to tell stories; exploring the partnership between live music and UV performance; incorporating Makaton as a visual language; fulfilling a need for accessible live theatre for audiences with communication difficulties and sight and hearing loss.
We created performances to illustrate Lenny's music for "The Owl and the Pussycat", "Jabberwocky" and experimented with a small musical theme for our forthcoming production of "When the Dragons Came Back to Wales" which we hope to tour in the next couple of years.
As a result of this project, we are now using Makaton in all our productions as both a communication and performance technique.
We are also continuing to work with Lenny's wonderful music and continue our collaboration.
Scheherazade & The Quangle Wangle's Hat
In 2017 we collaborated with Lenny for the first time and we had a vision of working with the best live classical musicians there are.
We struck lucky and Lenny created his ensemble with musicians drawn from the ranks of BBC National Orchestra of Wales, amongst others.
we'd only worked to a cd soundtrack before, our first R&D looked at the relationship between live music and live performance and the incredible benefits, plus the challenges, this provides. We smashed out the two performances in 5 days - we found this difficult as we take time to reflect and allow inspiration to strike during our rehearsal and creative process. We view performances as an organic process, always improving, always aiming for a distilled essence of sensory genius.