The project that latest UKARIA residency recipient Kevin March will develop over the course of his stay, began with seeds planted more than 10 years ago.

“Sometimes, you cross paths with someone you immediately know you want to work with,” says Kevin March.

“Judith [Dodsworth] was one of those people.”

Kevin March

Composer Kevin March. Photo supplied

The composer and soprano had first met in 2010, at the New Opera Ventures Australia workshops, launched by Victorian Opera and ChamberMade Opera, where March’s opera Razing Hypatia was being showcased; Dodsworth was singing in another opera.

“I could immediately tell she had a fearless grasp of new music,” March recalls.

A week later, they ran into each other again at a conference centred around the Ancient Greek poet Sappho. March and his husband, an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of  Melbourne, were presenting the world that had gone into March’s song cycle Mythweaver that borrowed its text from her work.

Again, Dodsworth’s “expressiveness and musicality” in the performance of excerpts of Jo...