Creating knowledge to spark new ideas and encourage academic and creative excellence.
Our Research Agenda encourages academic researchers to work with us to explore contemporary issues relevant to our work and those of the cultural and academic sectors as well as society.
“…to collaborate with such an inspirational partner is an enormous opportunity to develop new ways of linking across sectors, faculties, and, as we learned most recently, species. It is really special.”
– Prof. Jennifer Richards, former Director of Newcastle University’s Humanities Research Institute
Initiatives include hosting a DARE Academic-in-Residence, participating in student research challenge labs and supporting collaborative PhDs. These have explored themes such as race and decolonialisation in opera, the physiological response of audiences to opera and music, arts engagement and storytelling as pathways to solidarity with refugees and asylum seekers; evaluation models for music education programmes, and improving captioning of performances to enhance access. A series of symposia and ‘sandpits’ with our partners have brought academics and practitioners together to explore themes including music and neurodiversity, cross-species communication, the nature of tears, and the many ways of meaning-making on stage.
“At the DARE sandpit ‘World Without Antibiotics’, it was fascinating to see how the issue could be approached from a range of perspectives. It shows what exciting things can happen when you put different people together who might not normally meet to discuss a topic”
– Dr Marta Cobb, Senior Congress Officer International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds
The DARE Art Prize encourages and challenges artists to work creatively with scientific researchers at the University of Leeds to produce new artistic work. Prize-winners to date have explored alternative ways to represent climate change; human perception and Artificial Intelligence; the impact of infrasound on the human mood, e-waste recycling as well as mathematics education and creativity.
Opera North is also a proud supporting partner of the CoSTAR LiveLab, in collaboration with the University of York, developing technologies for future live performance experiences using virtual production.
