Professor Pamela Howard OBE
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
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Theatre or Life :The Art of Charlotte Salomon (1917 - 1943 )
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The miracle of Charlotte’s short life is that her drawings live on. When, knowing her death was imminent she took her drawings to the local Doctor saying “ Take good care of these. They are my whole Life “. These works were painted in exile in Villefranche-sur -Mer. Charlotte could never have believed her story would be presented all over the world as a book or film/opera/art exhibition.
With nothing more than a small sketchbook she brought with her from Berlin, a tin box of watercolour paints and one small paintbrush, Charlotte painted fast and furiously never thinking of these works as Art, but more as a record of her life in France.
It was here that she met the singer Alfred Wolfsohn, who she called ‘ Daberlohn ‘ and who became the inspiration of her life.
The final moment of my production shows Charlotte on stage holding her parcel of 800 gouaches wrapped in brown paper. From the darkness , and to music written by the Czech composer Aleš Brezina, all the characters in her story appear. Her stepmother the opera singer ‘:Paulinka Bim-Bam ‘ takes the package from Charlotte , and instead hands her a copy of " Life or Theatre “ . The message of this story is that “Art cannot exist for itself, but must flow from Life .“ The lights dim except a final spotlight on Charlotte. She takes the book and appears to hand it to the audience.
Wherever we presented this, there was always a total silence before a huge round of applause. At a performance in Jaffa a spectator said to me : “Thank you. this is everyones story here. “.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Pamela Howard is a Director and Scenographer working primarily in opera and contemporary music theatre. Her practice encompasses large and small scale productions, in major opera houses and unloved and forgotten spaces.
Trained at the Slade School of Fine Art (1958/9) she has had full career as a theatre designer, developing a love of text and context with Fine Art. Since 2000 she has been the total creator of productions developing a scenographic language of beauty and simplicity on stage, where the performer is always ‘the carrier of the myth’. Sustainability and imaginative use of space are central to her practice. A compulsive observer of human life, she is never without a pencil and a sketchbook, notating the everyday, methodically storing her pencil sketches and reworking them on stage.
In 2013 she began a collaboration in Toronto with Librettist/actor Alon Nashman and composer Aleš BÅ™ezina on the creation of the original Sing-Spiel, Charlotte –a Tri-Coloured Play with Music. This production uniquely translates some of Charlotte Salomon’s 800 gouache paintings from her graphic novel Life or Theatre into the three dimensional world of her memory of her former life in Berlin. This production was premièred in Toronto in June 2016 , and then presented at World Stage Design in July 2017 at the Experimental Theatre. In June 2019 Charlotte –a Tri-Coloured Play with Music began it’s world tour starting in Toronto, then to the Jaffa International Music Festival, Lviv and Kiev (in the concert version), Prague National Opera - Nova Scena and Lytomysyl International Music Festival (Czech Republic)
In 2018 Pamela was awarded a Public Arts Commission from Arts Dream Selsey to create a large scale Mural Out of the Ashes funded by the Big Lottery Fund and Ferry Farm Community Grant Fund for a community Arts based project as a response to the fire in Selsey in August 2016 that burnt the Academy School down. Out of the Ashes is a large scale 3-dimensional artwork visualising Arts Dream community memory project of the 50 years of the Selsey Academy, and made entirely from recycled materials.
In November 2019 as part of the UK wide year long Insiders/Outsiders Festival, Pamela with writer Philip Glassborow and music consultant Norbert Meyn, created an original music theatre sing spiel The Ballad of the Cosmo Café. A reprise is planned for 2022/23
Pamela is often the initiator and creator of collaborative projects that unite artists from many countries through Art and Music. Author of What is Scenography? now in 7 languages, 3rd edition published 2019. Publishers Taylor and Francis (see writer page)
2008 awarded the OBE for ‘Services to Drama’
International Chair in Drama Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama
Visiting Professor Arts University Bournemouth
Professor Emeritus University of the Arts London
Honorary Fellow Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts