Studio 12, 4pm
Running time: 90 mins
Come Worship Our Uncanny King is an interactive immersive opera-ritual in which you come and worship your uncanny king.
They exist as our world.
They are beautiful.
They are terrible.
They never lie.
They hoard the truth.
They have bound us.
They are the Uncanny King.
Your community has become the court of an inexpressibly powerful uncanny thing. It requires you to honour it, praise it, and serve it. You will decide how as you master rituals, make offerings, and strive for the favour amid the dangerous gaiety of the Uncanny King.
Director / performer: Leo Doulton
Performer: CN Lester
Leo Doulton is a writer and director working in interactive theatre and opera. Interactive highlights writing-directing on The Key of Dreams (Treowen, 2024), Paradise Craved (Theatre Deli, 2023), Come Bargain With Uncanny Things (Virtually Opera, 2022), and being appointed Associate Creative Director of Lemon Difficult in 2023. The interactive novel Rites of Angels will be published by voidspace press shortly. Operatic highlights include work for the Royal Opera House, Scottish Opera and Longborough Festival Opera.
Leo has been supported by a Theatre Deli Classic Residency, an Opera Awards Foundation Bursary, and a Britten Pears Foundation Creative Retreat.
CN Lester is a multi-genre musician, author of the critically-acclaimed Trans Like Me, and artistic director of Transpose at Barbican.
CN is both an alternative piano-based singer-songwriter and classical singer, improviser, and composer. They hold an interdisciplinary performance/research PhD on composer Barbara Strozzi. They work internationally as a trans/queer/feminist educator, writer, speaker, and activist.
Words and music at BBC Radio 3 & 4, Newsnight, Sydney Opera House, Southbank Centre, The Arts Club, arts and book festivals/radio/print worldwide. They made their fiction debut with the 2023 collection Furies, alongside Margaret Atwood, Ali Smith, and Emma Donoghue.
CN is currently working on their next album, next non-fiction and fiction books, upcoming Strozzi opera, and forthcoming academic publications.