Create Space May 2026 Residency
The May 2026 Create Space Residency continues our partnership with Performance Space to bring alumni from their Queer Development Program (QDP) to the Sydney Opera House.
First launched in 2012, QDP builds and strengthens queer creative practice and performance in Australia, providing opportunities for queer artists to develop creative skills, ideas, and industry connections.
The Castration of Uranus is a hybrid live art opera that merges notated music, improvisation, and performance to explore queerness, ecology, and identity through chamber opera, installation, extended clarinet practice, and physical theatre. Drawing on the myth of Uranus’ castration and the sexual deception of Australian wasp orchids (Chiloglottis), the work is rooted in the artist’s lived experience and ongoing fascination with the clarinet, orchids, and the body. The orchid’s etymological link to the Greek órkhis becomes both metaphor and provocation, informing a search for a phantom testicle, a future husband, and rare native flora. By queering operatic tradition, the work brings together myth, experimental music, and ecological ritual in a poetic and absurd journey through transformation, embodiment, and the shifting relationship between nature and culture.
The project underwent its first stage of development in May 2025 at the Sydney Opera House as part of the ongoing partnership with Performance Space and its Queer Development Program. This next phase of development is supported through the Create Space Residency with financial and in-kind production support.
During the Create Space Residency, the artist will further develop the work’s interdisciplinary language, integrating sound, movement, and installation. The residency will culminate in a showing. A dog will be present as part of both the residency and the showing.
This residency is supported by Creative Australia.
About the artist
Solomon Frank
Developing Artist
Solomon Frank is a composer performer living and working on Cammeraygal land, whose inter- disciplinary practice straddles cross-species musical collaboration, vacuum cleaners, and time travel. Solomon’s works have been performed by Ensemble O@spring, Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows, Kirkos Ensemble (Ireland), double bassist, Will Hansen, Willoughby Symphony Orchestra and E-Mex Ensemble (Germany) and he has presented and performer work as part of Mona Foma (Tasmania), Volume (AGNSW), on Spicks and Specks (ABC tv), Canberra International Music Festival, Liveworks, Cementa, and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney. Solomon’s improvisational practice expands upon the clarinet, replacing parts of the clarinet with other objects, homemade aluminium and plastic reeds, balloons, hoses, vacuum cleaners, and pumps. Solomon thinks of his music as “dystopian nostalgia for the present”; it reflects upon art music’s precarious place in a world dictated by corporate technocrats, TikTok algorithms, and celebrity deification. Additionally, Solomon is undertaking a PhD researching animals and music, exploring interspecies musical collaboration with dogs as means to question the human uniqueness of musicality and creativity.
