Tom Service travels to Bristol’s The Galleries shopping centre, home of Bristol’s Eye Hospital Assessment centre, to visit a new installation featuring the testimony of 100 voices from across 12 NHS hospitals – including doctors, porters, nurses, consultants, and patients – which have been curated into an hour-long immersive experience.
Providing a therapeutic space for contributors to express themselves, and an opportunity for audiences to contemplate the lived experience of hospital communities, Tom learns how the project’s composer, Hannah Conway, and librettist, Hazel Gould, created four arias around common themes they encountered, and hears how they’ve become creatively projected into a bespoke structure that will tour Bristol, London, Preston and Addenbrooke over the coming weeks. With contributions, too, from Manager at NHS Lancashire Teaching Hospitals, Dipa Dave, and Head of Arts at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Natalie Ellis.
