We want to know what you think about…well, um, everything, really.

Every day you create a thousand works of art that go unappreciated. From the rhythm of your footsteps on your way to work to the pillow sculpture you make on your bed at night, you use your creativity in countless ways. Unique mixtapes, funny anecdotes, secret shortcuts, well coordinated outfits… we’d like you to share your everyday works of art with the world.

Polyartistry develops crowd-sourced works of art involving different kinds of realtime and online interaction, based around a simple premise:  ‘What do you think about…?’

Check out some of our recent work in partnership with Opera Australia where we asked people what they thought about opera and The Historic Houses Trust/Domes Day project where we asked people what they thought about architecture and domes!

Drawing on the unique skillset of its members, Polyartistry’s works are platforms for large-scale creativity. Whether developing the libretto for an opera through the medium of Twitter, or constructing an outdoor loungeroom for passers-by to decorate and customise, Polyartistry makes windows through which people can get in touch with their own imagination.

About Polyartistry

Formed in October 2009, Polyartistry’s creative team includes musician and artistic director Nicole Canham, playwright David Finnigan, film‐maker Sarah Kaur, designer Matthew Aberline and a network of associate artists.  Individually we have curated, created and presented site specific programs for The National Gallery of Australia, The National Library of Australia, Manning Clark House, Old Parliament House, The National Film and Sound Archive, The Australian National Botanic Gardens, The Australian National Museum, The Australian Science Festival, the Powerhouse Museum, the Cultural Center of the Philippines and National Science Week. We’ve worked on festivals including Mardi Gras, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Hong Kong Youth Festival, The Sydney Festival, L’Oreal Fashion Week, The Melbourne Museum, The Canberra International Music Festival, The Crack Theatre Festival, the Asia-Pacific Complex Systems Conference, This Is Not Art, ABC Science, The Young Music Society Summer School and The Singapore International Film Festival. Our work has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, Limelight, Swim TV, Canada and on ABC Classic FM. Polyartistry created an experimental crowd-sourced opera project with the people of Sydney in partnership with Opera Australia and ABC Classic FM – POLYOPERA, www.youtube.com/user/polyopera in 2010 and worked with the Historic Houses Trust to celebrate the restoration of the Hyde Park Barracks Domes in 2011.

As we gear up to the launch of our youtube clips on Wednesday, we got so excited we decide to share some production pictures from Don Giovanni: Remixed and Lakme: Parramatta Imaginings. Check out a snippet below and view the full galleries on our facebook page here!

If you were at our Don Giovanni event in Blacktown on the 16th of June, you might be able to hear yourself! This is a sample clip of Morganics directing our opera/beat lovin’ crowd and creating some sounds to battle with.
Beat Box Orchestra with Morganics Polyopera 17 June

Polyopera – opera where you least expect it. Lakme, La Boheme and Don Giovanni remixed!

Some of our fabulous contributors made us some hot graffiti, to project during the performance of Don Giovanni: Remixed aka The Don. For those who couldn’t make it out to blacktown, we’ve posted the finished product below. Thanks to Nick and Andrew for sending these in. Happy Friday!

Polyopera – opera where you least expect it. Lakme, La Boheme and Don Giovanni remixed!

Listen to our beatbox orchestra with Morganics at the Don Giovanni: Remixed performance in Blacktown last Friday. We’d love to hear from any beatboxers out there so feel free to leave us a comment, or send us a video of your work! Enjoy!

Listen to the Beatbox Orchestra on Sound Cloud

Polyopera – opera where you least expect it. Lakme, La Boheme and Don Giovanni remixed!

A HUGE thanks to everyone who came out to Don Giovanni: Remixed and Lakme: Parramatta Imaginings on Friday and Saturday. Here are a few behind the scenes shots to whet you appetite for our final films which we are editing right now! We’ll be releasing the final films on 29th June so make sure you check them out – you could be a star!

Polyopera – innovative experimental opera. Lakme, La Boheme and Don Giovanni remixed!

Here’s the video of dance group youMove performing some of their Bollywood-inspired dance which will feature this Saturday in the Lakme event! Check it out and have a practice at home if you want to join in as a dancer!

Untitled from Sarah Kaur on Vimeo.

Polyopera – opera where you least expect it. Lakme, La Boheme and Don Giovanni remixed!

Featured in Lakme: Parramatta Imaginings is a Sydney professional company of contemporary dancers – youMove. Led by youMove director kay Armstrong, they rehearse at a studio in Sydney Olympic Park every week, hail, shine or public holiday. Matthew and I visited them last Thursday to start rehearsals for Lakme. After a short briefing on the project, their costumes (Large billowing skirts, punjabi pants and colourful veils from the Opera Australia costume store!), I played them the draft music that Carlos, our composer has been working on. Kay and I set them a choreographic task – watch an be inspired by vintage Bollywood movie dance sequences and give it your own contemporary twist.

Polyopera – opera where you least expect it. Lakme, La Boheme and Don Giovanni remixed!

Follow this link to listen to the recording of New Music Up Late last Saturday night, featuring Polyopera!

Polyopera – opera where you least expect it. Lakme, La Boheme and Don Giovanni remixed!

La Boheme: Bohemian Deconstruction at CuriousWorks was such a success, with a lovely audience who made us so excited for our next two events.
So how can you get involved and help us to create our ten-minute mini operas? For La Boheme, the audience was invited to dress up in Opera Australia costumes, tell us their confessions of love in the ‘Confession lift’ (beautifully fitted out with an antique lounge and flowers, and creaking a bit scarily), write us poetry with our fridge magnets, take photos of themselves for our photo wall, and act as extras in our filmed sections.
Take a look at our photo albums to check out the space at CuriousWorks, all decked out for a night of bohemia.
There are plenty of easy, fun ways in which you can get involved in our next two events!
Check out the event pages: Don Giovanni: Remixed (aka The Don) and Lakme: Parramatta Imagings

Don Giovanni: Remixed is a hip-hop battle in Blacktown and some of our fabulous artists, Matt Cornell and Morganics, are running FREE workshops in hip-hop and b-boy style beforehand. You can register for these workshops by emailing us at polyopera@gmail.com.

Follow us on twitter (@polyopera) and tweet us battle rhymes! We’re putting together dialogue for our opera/hip-hip artists to use in the short film and it’s going to be made up of battle rhymes that we’ve had tweeted to us. Laura Scrivano, director extraordinaire, is collecting them and has posted up some samples on the website (www.polyopera.com).

Lakme: Parramatta Imaginings is taking the sad story of love and belonging from the famous opera Lakme and bringing it to the Bathhouse at Parramatta Park. A young British soldier stumbles upon the Indian princess Lakme as she and her maid are bathing and singing and soon the soldier and the princess fall in love – but when his army is called away, will he decide to stay with her?
We’re folding HUNDREDS of paper flowers to float down Parramatta river at sunset as part of the film, and we need your help to fold them! You can make them at home or on the day. Check out our helpful clip of the lovely Kayla and learn how to fold them. We will also be holding a (free) workshop with YouMove dancers to teach anyone who wants to be involved a simple dance sequence so you can be involved as a backing dancer in our video.
If you can’t make it on the day, you can still contribute! If you have a story of forbidden love and/or interracial relationships, we’d love to read them! We’ll have some performers doing readings of all the stories we receive with improvised live music to accompany them.

These two events are THIS FRIDAY AND SATURDAY! Once the filming is done, we’ll spend two weeks in post-production and then there will be a final screening event with Opera Australia.

We would absolutely love for you to come along and be involved – or just watch. Or if you can’t make it to the events, tweet us! Send us things!

Opera love,
The Polyopera Team.

Polyopera – opera where you least expect it. Lakme, La Boheme and Don Giovanni remixed!

Saturday morning at the Church Street Mall Farmers Market. Matthew and I trudged up the mall, lugging kilos of paper and our takeaway coffee to set up our Flower Making Workshop.

We were joined by people out doing shopping, people on the way home from a doctors visit, artists from a nearby Pop Up gallery, and some of the regular stall holders at the market. Our aim was to teach as many people as we could how to fold these flowers that will become (in less than a week!) the set of Lakme: Parramatta Imaginings. We soon learnt that once we taught a couple of people, those people became better teachers than us! Kayla is the remarkable daughter of the man who sells birds at the Markets, and she was a flower-making machine. See the video below for her instructions on how to make these flowers at home, then bring them next Saturday to the Bath House at Parramatta Park so we can include your work in our set installation.

We need about 3000 so we need all hands on deck! Also, we need volunteers on Saturday to man our flower making station, so if you are free and want to be part of the PolyOpera team for this event, please get in touch by sending us an email at polyopera@gmail.com

So here we are at the start of the day, with our scoreboard.

Some of our volunteers, breezing through the origami:

Kayla and I made invitations to next Saturday’s events in the park to the Stallholders (maybe we will be lucky enough to have the ice cream van!)

Here’s Kayla’s instructional video on how to make these at home. Just remember to start with a piece of square paper : )