A Place To Fall To Pieces
Isobel trained as an actor. Anna as a musician. They have come together to create a new form of musical storytelling: a merging of folk music and tales, spoken word, original composition and text, in an attempt to bring back the magic they used to be certain of.
Inspired by current folk revival and conservation movements, their own form of rewilding comes from digging up forgotten stories and using them to spin adjacent worlds where music and language are interchangeable, where they share a wide-open space with an audience that are moved to remember the communal power of storytelling.
A relatively new company, their first project together, A Great Fear of Shallow Living, a storytelling and live music show in collaboration with In Tandem Theatre Company, premiered at the Zoo Southside in 2017, where it was the winner of the Infallibles Award. It has since been revived for the Fireside Festival and a run at Draper Hall in London.
Their current project, A Place To Fall To Pieces, has been supported by Sage Gateshead’s Summer Studios, and was selected by Mahogany Opera as one of five international operas to take part in their Various Stages Festival 2020. A track from the show was shortlisted for ‘Voices from a Pandemic’ Bread and Roses Award 2020.
Its premier was a livestream performance at The Space, London and was subsequently invited to be a part of C venues’ digital programme at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021.
“Isobel and Anna Hughes are absolutely magnetic: Isobel as sage storyteller and Anna as seraphic singer and musician… a feat of great skill and talent, beautiful and poetic.” – The Reviews Hub
What is Foundry?
FOUNDRY 2022 is a new residency opportunity at Sage Gateshead; which makes our Sage Two performance space available to artists for 4 days of intensive development and rehearsal time, handing the venue over to musicians making new work in an unprecedented way.
What Isobel & Anna said about Foundry 2022:
‘We are so excited to bring A Place to Fall to Pieces back to Sage Gateshead, where it all started at Summer Studios. We’ll be in Sage Two for four days, rehearsing for our upcoming UK tour, which begins on 23 March. Through Foundry, we hope to build a multidisciplinary community with an emphasis on showcasing early career artists. We will use our time to explore the process of collaboration and the interchangeability between language, music and design, to open up a new form of storytelling.’