Latest news with #Belize-born
Irish Independent
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Storytelling and music combine in cautionary family tale at Mermaid Arts Centre
Cautionary Tales is billed as an introduction to opera that is ideal for first-time operagoers, families and primary school audiences. It opens at the Mermaid Arts Centre on Saturday, September 13, and is aimed at children aged seven and above. The production follows the success of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as Opera Collective Ireland returns with a second production created especially for children. The production also reflects the aim to launch the careers of emerging Irish opera artists by giving them the chance to perform major roles and grow their craft in a professional, collaborative setting. With five fast-moving stories, Cautionary Tales brings to life a miniature world of mischief and moral mayhem. From zoo antics to fire brigades, each tale captures the chaos of childhood through surprising twists and sharp humour – all framed by a sleepover setting where four singers spin tall tales and draw others into their imaginative worlds. Mischievous in tone and playful in its takes on right and wrong, Cautionary Tales sits comfortably alongside the work of Roald Dahl and David Walliams. Inspired by Hilaire Belloc's sharply moralistic poems, the opera promises to deliver an entertaining mix of mischief, music, and a good old-fashioned telling off. The opera was created by Errollyn Wallen CBE and premiered in 2011 to critical acclaim. The Belize-born British composer was recently named as one of the world's 20 most performed living classical composers. Her piano-led score in this opera is a blend of musical references, leaping from Bach to the Mission: Impossible theme. Opera Collective Ireland's 2025 staging offers a fresh and timely look at how children today are immersed in screen time – and it makes the case for the joy of shared, in-person experiences. As Errollyn Wallen said: 'I am delighted that Cautionary Tales will be enjoyed by Irish audiences. I relished composing this opera about badly behaved children – and their parents.' Cautionary Tales is on at the Mermaid Arts Centre, on Saturday, September 13, 2025. Tickets are €20 and €60 for a family of four and €70 for a family of five.
Ottawa Citizen
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Ottawa Citizen
Diddy's acquittals herald the death of #metoo
Article content So much of the Diddy trial focused on the performer's distinct sexual depravity — most notably those lotion-filled 'freak-offs' described in nauseating ad nauseam. But this was a case equally defined by a pathological consumption of drugs. Indeed, as the proceedings revealed, Diddy had a constant supply of narcotics on hand: marijuana, ecstasy, Klonopin — which he fed to girlfriends like Cassie and their revolving door of hired and acquired paramours. Article content Drugs complicate, well, everything and they complicated the Diddy case even as they took a backseat to sex. So much of the proceedings — along with the roots of #metoo — were wrapped up in consent, and nothing warps consent more than days-long binges of narcotics. This helps explain why Combs was exonerated on the most serious charges of 'sex trafficking' and racketeering conspiracy. His defense claimed the debauchery — the freak offs — were merely amped-up versions of old-fashioned swingerism, set — much like with Weinstein — against a backdrop of luxury yachts and five star hotels. Article content Article content Despite observers who insist there can never be consent when abuse is involved, Diddy's lawyers reiterated that consent was ever-present and implied. Folks freaked-off because they were being loved or paid — whether in cash or via career boost. Such combustible overlaps shadow many of the highest-profile #metoo-styled cases, which is why so few of them have resulted in actual jail time. Indeed, Weinstein is a rare movement outlier — imprisoned likely for life when men like Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose merely languish behind the bars of ruinous disgrace and irrelevance. Article content Such a future is unlikely to await Diddy, who as the New York Post noted on Wednesday could emerge from the trial as a 'martyr.' And why not (besides his clear cravenness)? In the near year since his arrest, article after article has appeared detailing some former friend, colleague, or interviewer recounting Diddy's alleged sexism or hypocrisy or penchant for violence. Article content Article content Yet besides Cassie, almost no one stepped forward. Many, as in many other #metoo cases, claimed fear — of his power, his proximity to guns and those who use them. Only Shyne, the Belize-born rapper who served nearly a decade in jail for that infamous 1999 nightclub shooting, had the guts to speak out. And perhaps only because he is now back in Belize serving as the Opposition Leader of its House of Representatives. Article content As they say on billboards across New York City's subway system — 'if you see something — say something.' But when it came to Sean 'Diddy' Combs, almost no one said anything. For years, decades even. And the results speak for themselves: Diddy is likely to walk free, exonerated by a soft-on-crime New York City judicial system failing their soft-on-crime citizens. Article content Social justice movements like #metoo are rooted in accountability — particularly from the alleged perpetrators. But accountability also extends to those who remained silent — or stoned or paid — at the sidelines. Because without their willingness to also demand justice, the actual justice system can only go so far. As Diddy prepares for likely bail and, ultimately, release, his trial may not officially kill #metoo off. But its already dwindling momentum is unlikely to ever recover. Article content
Edmonton Journal
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Edmonton Journal
Diddy's acquittals herald the death of #metoo
Article content So much of the Diddy trial focused on the performer's distinct sexual depravity — most notably those lotion-filled 'freak-offs' described in nauseating ad nauseam. But this was a case equally defined by a pathological consumption of drugs. Indeed, as the proceedings revealed, Diddy had a constant supply of narcotics on hand: marijuana, ecstasy, Klonopin — which he fed to girlfriends like Cassie and their revolving door of hired and acquired paramours. Article content Drugs complicate, well, everything and they complicated the Diddy case even as they took a backseat to sex. So much of the proceedings — along with the roots of #metoo — were wrapped up in consent, and nothing warps consent more than days-long binges of narcotics. This helps explain why Combs was exonerated on the most serious charges of 'sex trafficking' and racketeering conspiracy. His defense claimed the debauchery — the freak offs — were merely amped-up versions of old-fashioned swingerism, set — much like with Weinstein — against a backdrop of luxury yachts and five star hotels. Article content Article content Despite observers who insist there can never be consent when abuse is involved, Diddy's lawyers reiterated that consent was ever-present and implied. Folks freaked-off because they were being loved or paid — whether in cash or via career boost. Such combustible overlaps shadow many of the highest-profile #metoo-styled cases, which is why so few of them have resulted in actual jail time. Indeed, Weinstein is a rare movement outlier — imprisoned likely for life when men like Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose merely languish behind the bars of ruinous disgrace and irrelevance. Article content Such a future is unlikely to await Diddy, who as the New York Post noted on Wednesday could emerge from the trial as a 'martyr.' And why not (besides his clear cravenness)? In the near year since his arrest, article after article has appeared detailing some former friend, colleague, or interviewer recounting Diddy's alleged sexism or hypocrisy or penchant for violence. Article content Article content Yet besides Cassie, almost no one stepped forward. Many, as in many other #metoo cases, claimed fear — of his power, his proximity to guns and those who use them. Only Shyne, the Belize-born rapper who served nearly a decade in jail for that infamous 1999 nightclub shooting, had the guts to speak out. And perhaps only because he is now back in Belize serving as the Opposition Leader of its House of Representatives. Article content As they say on billboards across New York City's subway system — 'if you see something — say something.' But when it came to Sean 'Diddy' Combs, almost no one said anything. For years, decades even. And the results speak for themselves: Diddy is likely to walk free, exonerated by a soft-on-crime New York City judicial system failing their soft-on-crime citizens. Article content Social justice movements like #metoo are rooted in accountability — particularly from the alleged perpetrators. But accountability also extends to those who remained silent — or stoned or paid — at the sidelines. Because without their willingness to also demand justice, the actual justice system can only go so far. As Diddy prepares for likely bail and, ultimately, release, his trial may not officially kill #metoo off. But its already dwindling momentum is unlikely to ever recover. Article content
New York Times
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Jam Like a King: Charles Releases a Playlist
King Charles III, a classical music fan who has studied the cello, piano and trumpet, released an eclectic playlist on Monday featuring 17 artists, including Beyoncé, Bob Marley and Grace Jones. Music 'has that remarkable ability to bring happy memories flooding back from the deepest recesses of our memory, to comfort us in times of sadness, and to take us to distant places,' Charles said in a podcast on Apple Music, 'The King's Music Room,' released in conjunction with the playlist. Charles, who as the British monarch is head of the Commonwealth, a club of 56 nations that were mostly part of the British Empire, put out the playlist to mark Commonwealth Day, celebrated on the second Monday in March with events across member countries. The king, 76, may have had some help in choosing the songs from Errollyn Wallen, a Belize-born artist who was last year appointed Master of the King's Music. The honorary role was created during the reign of King Charles I in the 17th century. Here are some of the king's song choices. Beyoncé, 'Crazy in Love' While the playlist primarily featured artists from the Commonwealth, he included a few from outside the group, citing a personal connection to their music. Beyoncé made the cut. Daddy Lumba, 'Mpempem Do Me' In the podcast, recorded at Buckingham Palace, the king recalled a 2018 visit to Ghana, a Commonwealth nation, where he danced to the music of Ghanaian singer Daddy Lumba. Miriam Makeba, 'The Click Song' The South African singer Miriam Makeba, widely known as 'Mama Africa,' was a prominent opponent of apartheid. 'I shan't try too much to pronounce the title, as it requires a great deal of practice,' Charles said of her 1960s hit 'Qongqothwane,' known in English as 'The Click Song.' Diana Ross, 'Upside Down' 'When I was much younger, it was absolutely impossible not to get up and dance when it was played,' King Charles said of Ms. Ross's 1980 song. 'So, I wonder if I can still just manage it?' Kylie Minogue, 'The Loco-Motion' Ms. Minogue came to St. James's Palace to perform this song in 2012. 'This is music for dancing,' Charles said of the Australian singer's rendition of the song, written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin. 'It has that infectious energy which makes it, I find, incredibly hard to sit still.'
The Guardian
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The palace called and I heard myself saying yes': how Errollyn Wallen went from Top of the Pops to Master of the King's Music
For at least half her life, the Belize-born British composer Errollyn Wallen, appointed last year to the title of Master of the King's Music, has steered herself through a web of invisible rules. Classical composers, dead or alive, were male and white. Their Black and female counterparts were derided or ignored, excised from history. Then, slowly but definitively, things changed, and the institutions that used to give her the cold shoulder started to open up to the music they had dismissed. 'People always want to put labels on things, on people,' Wallen says, without rancour. 'Let them. You have to hang on to your own worth, see what needs doing. I was written off young, but then found a way through. There's still so much work to be done.' Wallen's musical range is ambitious, eclectic, often immediately appealing and expressive. Her huge catalogue includes works for ballet, brass bands, orchestras, choirs, solo singers, duos, pianists, chamber ensembles; her 22 operas make her almost as prolific as Verdi and nearly twice as productive as Puccini. She was the first Black woman to have music performed in the Proms, in 1998. Now among the most performed of living composers, she can't quite remember how many world premieres she has in the next few weeks (after a recount, she decides it's five), including two on the same night in different venues. She also has a new album out later this month: Errollyn Wallen Orchestral Works, played by the BBC Concert Orchestra. By any measure this is an achievement. Belying the glorious flamboyance of her appearance: pink statement glasses, a long waistcoat studded with felt flowers 'from a charity shop', black satin shirt trimmed with lace, fiery hair streaked with highlights ('thank goodness I'm going to the hairdresser this week'), Wallen's conversation is quiet, thoughtful, poised. A can-do determination marks her out. The prompt for our conversation, over scrambled eggs and coffee in a grand London club where she greets the staff and they greet her, is her new choral work, Reign. She has been down in London from her home in Orkney, excited to hear the first rehearsals. For high voices and organ, with her own hymn-like lyrics, it was commissioned by the feminist arts festival Women of the World (WOW), and will be performed on Saturday, International Women's Day, at the Royal Albert Hall. The singers are 150 women, girls and non-binary people aged between eight and 80 years drawn from three London-based choirs, Mulberry School for Girls, St Boniface School and Lips. Wallen was part of the original WOW team, founded by Jude Kelly in 2010. Is this festival focused on women still vital? 'I think it is,' says Wallen, 66. 'The world has always been in turmoil but recently it has taken a step back. Women in all parts of the world have faced a backlash. Girls and young women are still forbidden to have education. Misogyny abounds. If I hadn't had access to free education, I'd never have had the chance to succeed.' A child of the Commonwealth, as she considers herself, Wallen grew up in Tottenham, north London. Singing has always been part of her life. She loves the English Hymnal, the definitive book of Anglican church music, and sees it as part of her cultural heritage. A talented pianist, Wallen frequently led her fellow pupils at her all-girls' boarding school in Sussex in rousing accounts of Jerusalem, one of her favourite hymns. When the BBC commissioned a new version from her, for the Last Night of the Proms 2020 – the year of Covid – she combined a homage to Hubert Parry's original with a sensitive new creation. The Proms played to an empty Albert Hall, but aired on TV and radio. Afterwards, she received hundreds of messages of abuse, essentially attacking her for daring to tamper with this national icon. Speaking to Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in July last year, she said: 'I spent the next day deleting abusive messages thinking, 'Well, actually, when was the last time somebody really talked about a new piece of music in the national press? So yeah, I'll take it.'' Wallen's own astonishing life reads likes a set of disturbing short stories, set out in her 2023 memoir, Becoming a Composer. Soon after arriving in Britain, when she was two, her parents decided they would rather live in New York. She and her siblings were left with a childless aunt and uncle, Belize-born Arthur and Renee, a white EastEnder. Errollyn expected her parents to send for her to join them. They never did, though later the children spent summers in New York. She loved her aunt and uncle, and accepted their hopes and anxieties as her own. Home life offered a culinary mix of pie and mash, jellied eels and, a nod to Belize cuisine, rice with everything. Later, the young Errollyn, who for many years wanted to be a ballerina, put herself on a diet of cake, strictly limited, and became very thin, one of many uneasy incidents that, today, might sound alarm bells. Her ambition to dance was abandoned when she was told there were no Black ballerinas. Uncle Arthur, perceptive as well as authoritarian, was the first to suggest the constant sounds in Errollyn's head might indicate she was a composer. He also helped her see wider horizons, introducing her to poetry, literature and concerts at London's Wigmore Hall. 'I never thought it was strange that we were the only Black people there,' she says. 'I felt I could go anywhere. I will always thank Uncle Arthur for that. It must have been very difficult for him at that time.' Obstacles and educational diversions aside – she ran away from school and, in her late teens, made a suicide attempt nobody talked about – she went to Goldsmiths College to study music. She was steeped in the music of Pierre Boulez, Benjamin Britten, JS Bach and, one of her all-time musical gods, Stevie Wonder. She became a session musician, which included an appearance on Top of the Pops, to her chagrin miming to a pre-recorded backing track with girl group Eternal (but she got to meet Cher, who admired her leopard-print waistcoat). She also set up her own ensemble. Somehow, and it is hard to imagine quite how, Wallen always hung on to an innate sense of worth, even as she was being crushed. 'Show me your scores and we can have a good laugh' one influential concert director told her, in the 1980s, when her male contemporaries were securing performances of their works by elite groups such at the London Sinfonietta. Were her aunt and uncle alive now, or her distant but proud parents, would they countenance her appointment by King Charles? It came as a surprise to Wallen herself. She assumed the call from a palace official was an invitation to a reception. 'I heard myself say 'yes'. I had friends with me who cushioned the shock.' She is beginning to think how to direct her energies to the role – a post in the royal household, not dissimilar to that of poet laureate, whose loosely specified duties include composing music for important royal events. One of her imminent premieres is a work for solo soprano to be sung at the Commonwealth 2025 service in Westminster Abbey next Monday. Our wide-ranging conversation is over, with many brightly coloured strands left hanging. Later that day Wallen will return home to solitude, composition, the sea at the bottom of the garden. (She used to live in a lighthouse near Thurso. She has since moved even farther north, close to where one of her predecessors, Master of the Queen's Music, Peter Maxwell Davies, lived.) She will drive back to the sound, a current obsession, of the Jackson Five's I Want You Back – 'not very modern I know!' – thinking about how their clever bass line could fit with one of her own pieces. The relief of being there is constant, she says. 'I'm a Londoner but I have to be able to go to the piano when I feel like it and bash away late at night. You can't do that in a London flat.' Before she went there, three Black friends said, 'Won't you feel scared, being a in a place with so few Black people?' Orcadians, she says, are like the people of Belize: gentle, welcoming, accepting. 'If I want to go somewhere, nothing's ever really stopped me. I just go ahead and do it.' Errollyn Wallen's Reign has its world premiere at WOW at 15 – an event featuring music and conversation at the Royal Albert Hall, London, on 8 March. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
