Bloomsbury Festival: Sounding the Archive: The Emily Penrose Diaries
Conway Hall, Main Hall, WC1R 4RL , [Venue Details]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.
More Information
Admission
Min: £6.00
Max: £20.00
Performer name: Ilenia Cipollari
Doors open: 6:30 pm
Age restriction: All ages. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.
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Bloomsbury Festival: Sounding the Archive: The Emily Penrose Diaries
Saturday, 17 Oct 2026 @7.00pm
Conway Hall, Main Hall, WC1R 4RLMore Information
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.
Admission
Min: £6.00
Max: £20.00
Performer name: Ilenia Cipollari
Doors open: 6:30 pm
Age restriction: All ages. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.
Halibuts is the only place to find ALL London's live music.
Free for all to use, we track ~1,000 London venues and list every type of live music.
To reach our home page, Click here
Or download the Halibuts APP:
IOS
ANDROID