Raise Your Voice, Jersey!

A new opera. Made in Jersey, by Jersey.

Raise Your Voice, Jersey! is ArtHouse Jersey’s flagship community opera project - a bold, collaborative experiment in what opera can be when an Island tells its own story. Conceived and led by Jersey-born mezzo-soprano Georgia Mae Bishop, in collaboration with Producer Robyn Cabaret, the project brings together young Islanders, community collaborators, and a team of world-class professional artists to create a brand-new opera shaped by Jersey’s voices, landscapes, and lived experience.

This isn’t opera as you might expect. It is playful, contemporary, rooted in real lives, and built through a shared creative process where everyone has a part to play. At its heart is a simple belief: opera belongs to everyone - and the everyday stories of our Island are worthy of the operatic treatment.

What’s happened so far?

Since the summer of 2024, we’ve been working closely with young people aged 18-30 to explore themes of identity, belonging, resistance, humour, and what it means to call Jersey ‘home’. We held early composition workshops that introduced participants to vocal experimentation, storytelling through music, and the fundamentals of operatic structure. Follow-up sessions focused on text, character, rhythm, and collaborative authorship, planting the first seeds of what the opera might become.

Across two intensive writing weekends with the creative team at ArtHouse Jersey’s Greve de Lecq Barracks in April 2025, a brilliant group of collaborators joined us to co-create ideas for the opera’s storyworld. Through improvisation, discussion, play, and writing, the group explored themes ranging from Island mythology to contemporary pressures, and from migration and work to friendship, land, and return. These shared ideas formed the early DNA of our opera - its characters, tensions, humour, and emotional core - from which the Librettist Georgia Mae Bishop and Composer Charlotte Marlow wrote the opera.

In June 2025, we invited our collaborators back for a table read of the draft libretto - the first time the characters were heard aloud in their full dramatic arc. During this session, the personalities, relationships, and humour of the opera vividly came to life. Early casting conversations emerged naturally from hearing the roles spoken and sung, while the team began exploring initial staging ideas and the physical world of the piece. These insights directly informed the next stage of composition, ensuring the score is written in the right keys and shaped to the strengths and colours of the voices who will bring it to the stage.

By November 2025, the first full draft of the musical score was delivered, and each department - music, staging, design, and dramaturgy - is now refining their contributions ahead of final delivery in early January 2026, ready for the full rehearsal and production process to begin.

These points of connection with the community have shaped every stage of development, and their influence is deeply woven into the finished work.

Introducing our new opera: Held in the Tide

Our new opera, Held in the Tide, will premiere at the Jersey Opera House on Thursday 26 and Friday 27 March 2026.

Set on a shoreline in the aftermath of a storm, the opera follows the story of Lillie, a geologist who returns home after years away, and Frances, a local artist who never left. When a trio of ancient stones is revealed beneath the sand, it sparks a chain of reckonings - between progress and preservation, global ambition and local knowledge, and the past we inherit and the futures we might choose.

Blending classical, folk and electronic musical influences with a chorus of local voices, the opera is at once funny, moving, and deeply human - a story about home, community, and the things we hold on to when everything around us shifts.

Tickets are on-sale via Jersey Opera House’s website at THIS link. We can’t wait to share this new work with the Island.

Be part of the performance: Chorus Open Call now live

We are now searching for members of the community chorus who will perform in the opera alongside our professional cast of seven Jersey-born artists.

Whether you’re an experienced singer or a complete beginner, you are welcome. The chorus is at the heart of this production - shaping storms, stones, crowds, tides, and the collective voice of the Island.

Find out more and apply for our Chorus Open Call HERE.

What’s next?

The rehearsal process for the chorus begins in mid-January 2026, and the professional cast start rehearsals in early March 2026. Meanwhile, the creative team continue to refine the production:

Georgia Mae Bishop - Creative Director & Librettist
Charlotte Marlow - Composer
Cecilia Stinton - Stage Director
Ashley Beauchamp - Musical Director
Grace Garnier - Chorus Director
Robyn Cabaret - Producer

Together, they are shaping the final score, staging, and visual identity of the show, guided throughout by the ideas, stories and creative contributions gathered from our community collaborators.

Want to try your hand at creating?

If you missed the workshops or feel inspired to try your hand at creating, we’ve put together a set of creative prompts used during our sessions to help spark ideas in writing, storytelling, visual art, and music. Download the Raise Your Voice, Jersey! Creative Tasks HERE.

Raise Your Voice, Jersey! is a living, evolving creative process - part opera-making, part community-building. It is a celebration of the stories we inherit, the stories we live, and the stories we return to. In a time when questions of home, identity, and belonging feel more urgent than ever, this project reminds us that community isn’t something we inherit. It’s something we shape; together.

Thank you to everyone who has taken part so far. We can’t wait to continue this journey with you.

Commissioned and Produced by ArtHouse Jersey. Developed and Presented in partnership with Jersey Opera House. Part of the New Work Programme supported by Coutts Crown Dependencies.