Helen Chadwick

At the heart of my music and theatre world is songwriting and singing: in concerts, song-theatre performances, site-specific works, recordings and empowering experiences.

Albums are mainly of multi voiced songs without accompaniment. Poets: Some of the many magnificent poets whose work I have set as songs include Anna Akhmatova, Frances Bellerby, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Hilda Doolittle (HD), George Eliot, Goethe, Hafiz, Nazim Hikmet, Kabir, Federico García Lorca, Antonio Machado, Recep Marasli, Osip Mandelstam, Pablo Neruda, Odia Ofeimun, Katheleen Raine, Irina Ratushinskaya, Rainer Maria Rilke, Christina Rossetti, Percy Blythe Shelley, Stevie Smith, Rabindranath Tagore, RS Thomas, Marina Tsvetayeva, Paul Verlaine, Virgil, Saadi Youssef and many others.

Helen Chadwick Song Theatre creates concerts, site-specific work for choirs and soloists and song-theatre performances, the following created with Steven Hoggett: Truth, War Correspondents and Dalston Songs.

Song-theatre commissions include for the Royal Opera House and Birmingham Repertory Theatre. We have toured in the UK, Spain, Colombia, Finland and the Ukraine. Site-specific choral commissions include for Greenwich and Docklands International Festival and Salisbury Festival and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Song-story commissions include for the Getty Villa in Los Angeles. Community Projects include operas for English Touring Opera. Solo song-theatre performances have toured in the UK, France, Denmark, Italy, Brazil and Argentina.

Recordings I love to set great poetry, and my albums are full of these songs. I also work to commission. You can hear clips of my songs on the downloads page.

Music for Theatre, Film and on Air:  I have composed and arranged songs for theatres including the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre,  Shared Experience and the Royal Court; for directors Katie Mitchell, Simon McBurney and Michael Thomas; as well as for the BBC. Commissions in the time of Covid include songs for online theatre on film: Nothing On Earth – shorts and for the Wye Valley Will It Ever Be The Same Again?

Coaching: My longest ever freelance job was a blissful seventeen years attached a few hours here and there to the National Theatre Studio doing warm ups, voice work and running a choir for actors and NT company members and staff. I’ve also taught at RADA, Central, LAMDA, Rose Bruford, Goldsmiths, for community choirs, run songwriting workshops and taught in over twenty countries, sometimes in my rough Spanish, French, Italian, German as well as my voice teacher’s mime. Now I also coach for Dramatic Resources

Sing For Water: Along the way, I dreamed up Sing for Water,  founded as a mass choir singing project with Thames Festival to raise money for WaterAid. So far it has raised well over a million pounds for projects in Africa and Asia over 20 years.

Awards: A President’s Award from WaterAid and an Honorary Fellowship from Dartington College of Arts.