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.

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.

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.

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.