Laura Bowler
Winner of this year’s RPS Award for Chamber-scale Composition, Laura Bowler is a composer and performer who lives to push boundaries and disrupt the cultural status quo, as shown in her winning work, Wicked Problems. Her new opera, The Blue Woman, will open at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre in July.
I think very physically when
I’m writing. I pretty much sing every part I write, so it’s very much coming from my own body. A lot of what drives me is that I deeply care about most of the things I’m tackling. A er I’ve written, I always feel like I’ve been dragged through a bush backwards! It’s a very emotionally exhausting experience.
Doing a masters in theatre directing at RADA was revelatory. Before every project we’d ask ‘Why are we making this?’, ‘Why now?’ and ‘Who are we making it for?’ – questions I’d never been asked to think about during my training as a composer. Wicked Problems is one of a few works I’ve written about climate change. This was me attempting to do it on a smaller scale – my Antarctica piece was massive. When I had the chance to write this piece, it was important to try and encapsulate it on a more intimate level.
I’d like to write more instrumental music. My favourite instrument has always
been the cello. It’s so dexterous and it has so many di erent qualities; I just find it glorious, which is why my opera for next year is having four cellists.
The Blue Woman is a project that I’ve been thinking about for years. It looks at the fractured female psyche, post-sexual violence, and it pulling itself together again. It’s a very hopeful piece, and it was really important to me that I made a piece that wasn’t doing what the operatic canon so o en does, which is place the woman as victim. The libretto is by Laura Lomas; it’s just incredibly beautiful and I feel so lucky to be doing it.
A lot of my influence comes from outside music. I have lots of images of [designer] Alexander Mcqueen shows around – there’s a brutality and a beautiful violence in his work that I find captivating. It’s the boldness, directness and unapologetic approach to creating work that really inspires me. I like work that’s not afraid to be vulnerable or to be raw and imperfect.