Image from Greater Birmingham and Solihull LEP The shocking-to-some news is in, that Birmingham City Council has announced cuts to all funding for culture projects and local-arts development, with the CBSO, Birmingham Repertory Theatre and Birmingham Royal Ballet facing a 100% reduction to their support in the next financial year. The news which affects most of Birmingham’s major arts organisations hit hard yesterday.  Here are the figures so far: Birmingham International Dance Festival will lose its £350,000 funding and grants to regularly funded arts organisations will face 50% cuts th ..read more

On her oldest daughter’s tenth birthday, Director of B’Opera and Motherhood Activist Zoë Challenor reflects on what ten years of motherhood has taught her: “The personal is the political” - Carol Hanisch Mothering has been made invisible. Which is dangerous. The invisible can be devalued, taken for granted and erased. Think of how you need to pay someone to look after your children when you go out of the home to work. Yet when you do it, it's "free". You’ve been conditioned to believe it’s your fault when it’s all going south. “Mum guilt”, “burnout” that messy house, depression, exhaustion ..read more

We’ve spent a significant amount of this summer living out of suitcases and camping, so our main activity has been hunting for clean pairs of pants. Youngest took all the teddies on holiday with her. Those bags are full of teddies. Nothing else. And the cello came too. Guess how many times it got played. Once. For one and a half minutes. I wish I was exaggerating. We spent hours travelling like sardines up to our eyeballs in teddies and oversized musical instruments so that some stuffed non-sentient animals could “feel the sea air”, and we could hear Chase in the Dark played a third too low b ..read more

The Magic Flute - Welsh National Opera Wales Millennium Centre ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Image credit: WNO If there's to be opera in the future, today's children need to be discovering it now. So one of the many delights of experiencing Daisy Evans’ new production of WNO’s The Magic Flute at the Wales Millennium Centre alongside a few hundred school children, was seeing and hearing their spontaneous, unschooled reactions. “That was weird” exclaimed one teenager at the end, while another imitated Queen of the Night’s high notes, scarily well. I noticed their stunned silence in the first half, followed by who ..read more

One of last year's big projects was finishing the Certificate for Music Educators in Early Childhood (CME:EC) accredited by Trinity College London. I was grateful to the Youth Music funded Sounds of Play for funding which made it possible for me to do the course, and wrote to them to describe what I learned. Trinity College published these reflections as a blog which you can read here and I'm also sharing it with you below. "Articulating the potential benefits of the Trinity Certificate for Music Educators (CME) programme to prospective learners can sometimes be a little tricky. Yes, we can t ..read more

When we centre the voices of women and children, we contribute to breaking down patriarchal norms.* Here's how we go about this at B'Opera: ‍♀️ MotherVoice creative sessions online to give those who mother a space to breathe, connect, step away from constant demands and create ‍♀️ Relaxed shows, concerts and workshops where you understand that you can feed, move around, not worry about any noise your little one makes, and step away from the traditional idea that parenting has to look a certain way Offering a range of sessions from weekend morning concerts to weekday morning workshops to eveni ..read more

We groan and grumble when our little ones discover the word “no”. I mean, in our carefully ordered lives where we like to have a little (let’s be honest, for some of us a lot, of control), it’s inconvenient when some tiny dictator decides to do a runner in M&S turning our shopping trip into a full on 25 minute manhunt through racks of sensible clothes while we experience the kind of indescribable heart-stopping panic that shaves years off our lives. Saying “no” is a normal and necessary developmental milestone where a child recognises themselves as separate from their carers, as someone w ..read more

Zoë Challenor - Director, B’Opera What struck me most about B’Opera’s first sharing of Hello Bird, Hello Fish! was that the audience experienced it as the opening of a conversation. And they used the feedback and food session that followed, to reply. There was no preamble, no need for the carefully crafted prompt questions we’d placed on the tables between samosas and carrot sticks. Just straight in with their own stories of exclusion, of being judged for the colour of their skin or their religion, a memory of a song sung by a mother and the emotions it stirs up. A desire for these children t ..read more

Coming to England at Birmingham Rep Theatre I’ve had two lightbulb experiences recently, both a result of engaging with the arts. The first was during Coming to England at Birmingham Rep Theatre last week, the story of Floella Benjamin’s journey from Trinidad to England, and the prejudice she and her family encountered. Of course there was more to her life and to the story than prejudice, but slurs, insults, being chased out of church, and people reporting her family to the police because of the colour of their skin, were a significant part of the play. Young Floella has an aha moment as she ..read more

Photo by Simran Sood on Unsplash What images pop up for you when you think of the word "Mother"? If you fancy making an experiment of it, give yourself 60 seconds to make a note. I'd love it if you'd share them with me. Many of us will find idealised notions of motherhood surfacing - nurturing, giving, unlimited patience, self-sacrifice, being superwoman, perfect endless love, self-denial,... And while we probably all have flashes of some of these, what a handicap of a lie we have all been sold. That on some level motherhood involves trying to be perfect and denying the self. Talk about setti ..read more