A Little Night Opera
Artangel Interaction’s Night of London series, commissioned Bridget Zaidee Nicholls’ bat opera.
Sonar clash
The complete Nights of London series was celebrated on Friday 24 November 2006 with Because the Night at the old Bethnal Green Town Hall, London, featuring performances, readings and films dedicated to darkness.
In A Little Night Opera, Bridget Nicholls showcased the sonar clash of the feuding moth and bat that hatched the evolution of the butterfly. She performed with pianist Nathaniel Woodcock as the moth (on melodic and percussive piano) and Mark Pilkington as the bat (on keyboard).
Running for just over a year, Nights of London was a thread of projects exploring the nocturnal life of the city. It ran through cinemas and galleries, was hosted on websites, burned onto CDs, written into letters, performed in nightclubs and broadcast via radio channels, before concluding in an old East End town hall that – for one night only – was filled with bat experts, musicians, cabaret artists and paranormal researchers. Visitors heard stories from the unorthodox side of nightfall and learned about ways of life that, despite their physical proximity, are all but invisible to most of us, most of the time.
