OUGD603 - Left Bank Opera Festival

Brief Name: Left Bank Opera Festival

Time Scale: 11 days

Deadlines: 23rd April

Background: The Left Bank Opera Festival is an annual event, drawing audiences from across the UK for a celebration of rare and wonderful operas. Our 2018 Left Bank Opera Festival is concerned with opera’s long (and often contentious) relationship with Asia. We will perform three works which each look at different facets of this relationship:

• Raymond Yiu’s ‘The Original Chinese Conjuror’; a comic opera which tells the true story
of an American magician who adopted the persona of a Chinese man to make his act
more exciting. The opera embraces the early 1900s setting of the story in its music,
and contains lots of on-stage magic (this may make for the most attractive marketing
image)
• Gustav Holst’s ‘Savitri’; a dark and dramatic adaptation of a traditional Indian folk story,
concerning the relationship between a woman, her husband and Death
• Camille Saint-Saens’ ‘The Yellow Princess’; the story of a man who is obsessed with the
drawing of a Geisha on the front of a cabinet, and his opium-induced hallucinations about
a mysterious and beguiling Japanese lady

There are some wonderful literal and figurative images that can be drawn from these
operas. What is most important to us is that the design reflects an element of tension in the
relationship between Western opera, and Asia, but is also an attractive image for potential
audiences to the Festival.

Brief: This year, they are looking for an artist or designer to create the image that will be used to
promote the Left Bank Opera Festival.This can be in any medium, as long as it works well when photographed or transferred to a digital image for use in print and online. The content of the design is open but consider the theme of the festival and the audience.