a digital opera in 15 scenes

co-created by composer Michael Betteridge and Collaborators

from Second Movement and Tourettes Actions’s

Your Story, Your Voice, Your Stage project

film by Alisdair Kitchen

produced by Second Movement and Tourettes Action

streamed July 2021

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Opera-tic explores through song, sound and image what it means to live with Tourette Syndrome. The music, text and film of the opera have been created to relate and represent its collaborators’ experience, stories and sensations of TS. There are moments of tension, but also release, of contemplation and great humour.

It is also a representation of the strength we can all find in ourselves, to accept a challenge, which sometimes we’ll fail but often win, to adapt to circumstances we never thought we’d meet and to find compassion and empathy for others when we may not understand or know what is going on for them, and most importantly to never lose our sense of humour.

Opera-tic was co-created online, through a year of pandemic, by 15 adults with Tourette Syndrome from across the UK and composer Michael Betteridge as part of Second Movement and Tourettes Action’s co-creative opera making project Your Story, Your Voice, Your Stage.

Find out more about Second Movement and Tourettes Action’s Your Story, Your Voice, Your Stage project and how Opera-tic was made in this Q and A led by David Micklem with five of Opera-tic‘s makers: Alisdair Kitchen, Charlotte McGregor Graham, Giovanni Arsciwals, Michael Betteridge and Paul Stevenson.

Your Story, Your Voice, Your Stage is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.