Bloomsbury Festival:
Sounding the Archive: The Emily Penrose Diaries

Ilenia Cipollari weaves archival text with medieval and Mediterranean polyphony to investigate memory, erasure, and the living voice.

Developed during a research residency at the British School at Athens, this performance focuses on the 1887 diaries of Emily Penrose, investigating how women’s voices appear, disappear, and re-surface within institutional histories. Treating the voice as both archive and encounter, the piece is a minimalist, seated reading interwoven with vocal work. Archival fragments are braided together with Corsican and Epirote polyphonies, Italian songs of migration, and 12th-century chant by Hildegard von Bingen. Supported by the grounding drone of a shruti box, this trauma-aware work asks audiences to value presence over polish, creating a temporary commons for shared respiration and listening across time. Emily Penrose was an historian, academic, a principal of three colleges and instrumental in the University of Oxford’s admission of women in the 1920s.

This event is part of Bloomsbury Festival 2026.

CAST & CREATIVE TEAM:

Franziska Böhm • voice, flute
Franziska is a German-born, London-based artist, researcher and librarian working across dance, music, academia and hospitality. Her practice centres on slowing down, sensing, trusting and collaboration, and she explores politicised somatics, including Skinner Releasing Technique, as a way of cultivating personal and collective power.

Olivia Carstairs • voice
Olivia trained at the Royal College of Music and performs across opera, concert and choral repertoire. Her credits include Amelfa in The Golden Cockerel with Orchestra VOX, Hurn Court Opera, and the Philharmonia Chorus at the Royal Albert Hall and Royal Festival Hall. This autumn she joins Hampstead Garden Opera for Bellini’s La Sonnambula.

Ilènia Cipollari Ganucci • creative director, writer, musical director, voice
Ilènia is an Italian-British vocalist, actor and performance-maker working across performance art, theatre and film, with screen credits for Sky and Netflix. She has sung with Idrîsî Ensemble and Musarc, collaborated with Corsican polyphonic ensemble A Filetta through Song of the Goat Theatre, and performed at Yale Repertory Theatre, Battersea Arts Centre and Edinburgh Fringe. A practice-research doctoral candidate at University of the Arts London, she created Sounding the Archive from her 2024–25 British School at Athens Arts Bursary.

Kirsty Ferguson-Lewis • voice
Kirsty is a London-based singer, composer, producer and performer who explores the feminine voice through the lens of mythology. Her mini-opera Sirena (2025) ran at The Glitch in Waterloo and was released as her debut album. She has performed at the ICA, Café OTO and Lisson Gallery, has been broadcast on BBC Radio 6 Music, and sings with Musarc and Orchestra New.

Oli Kitching • musical director, voice
Oli is a conductor, singer and facilitator, and Musical Director of the experimental contemporary choir Musarc. Oli conducts the Cambiata Girls Choir for London Youth Choirs, conducted Oliver Leith’s Garland at Bold Tendencies, and leads songwriting projects in prisons for the Irene Taylor Trust. Their training in psychotherapy shapes a relational approach to music-making and leadership.

Olga Orlanda Quinn née Kunicka • voice, violin
Olga  is a Polish actor, singer, violinist and writer who trained at the Music Academy in Wrocław. As a member of Song of the Goat Theatre she toured Europe, the UK, Asia and North America, and as a musician she has performed with artists including Montserrat Caballé, Andrea Bocelli and José Carreras.

Special guest, Sunday 18 October only

Anna McLuckie • voice, harp
Anna is a Scottish singer, songwriter and clàrsach player. Raised on classical and traditional music, she draws on popular and experimental sounds to create songs of contemporary folklore, layered with interweaving harmonies, story-led lyricism and free-form structures.

IN COLLABORATION WITH MACHINALOCI SPACE LONDON

machinaloci space is a London space for seriously playful research into alternative ways of being, thinking and doing together, through art making, written and spoken word, movement, conversation, singing, cooking and storytelling. Its name joins machina, a device, with loci, a place, and it tests forms of exchange beyond commercial frameworks. Sounding the Archive rehearses at machinaloci space.

Age Recommendation:

All ages. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Price:

*A £2 venue levy is applied to each ticket purchased. This levy helps to support us in covering the costs of keeping our grade II listed building running and our doors open.*

Supporter £20 • Standard £12 • Living Support £6 • Student £6     (+ £2 venue levy)

Access Information:

This event is in the Main Hall, which is located on the ground floor. The balcony is accessible only by stairs.

All the ground-floor rooms are accessible by wheelchair. Main Hall (street access, step-free), Brockway Room (street access, step-free), Russell Room (street access, shallow ramp), Cafe (street access, step-free). There is also an accessible toilet on the ground floor opposite the Brockway Room.