Founded in 2012 by director and artistic leader Ella Marchment, Helios Collective was an award-winning opera company that had development and connectivity at its heart. Through innovative and imaginative programming, Helios enabled an international community of performers, creatives, and arts partners to work together to shape the future of opera.
Operating until 2021, Helios Collective sought to expand opera beyond conventional productions and venues. Its work combined established repertoire with new commissions, adaptations, workshops, concerts, club nights, and interdisciplinary collaborations. At the centre of Helios’s identity was the idea that opera should be a living, flexible art form—one capable of engaging new audiences while providing meaningful opportunities for artists to develop their skills.
I left feeling that the future of British civilization is in good hands, larynxes, and batons
The Express
Ella Marchment created Helios while also building a career as a stage director, artistic director, producer, professor, speaker, and arts entrepreneur. Training and working across opera, theatre, and related performance fields, Ella directed more than eighty opera and theatre productions and produced over one hundred arts events for Helios Collective. Her professional interests extended beyond staging existing works: she was especially committed to developing new projects, supporting emerging artists, and creating connections between opera and other artistic disciplines. This combination of creative ambition and organizational leadership shaped Helios from its beginning.
One of Helios Collective’s defining characteristics was its broad programming. The company presented canonical operas, newly commissioned pieces, masterclasses, opera-plays, experimental events, and reimagined versions of familiar works. Among many critically acclaimed successes, its projects included The Bear Goes Walkabout, a production that staged an evocative version of William Walton’s The Bear alongside newly commissioned material; a sell-out double-bill tour of William Walton’s Façade and Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King; and a much-lauded remodelling of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. These productions demonstrated Ella’s interest in questioning traditional presentation models while retaining opera’s dramatic and musical power.
Helios Collective is something to be excited about: our music is in their hands
Broadway Baby
Helios also developed projects that brought opera into less formal and more socially accessible environments. Its groundbreaking Toi Toi productions presented a festival series of operatic club nights at the CLF Art Lounge in Peckham, treating opera as a communal and contemporary experience rather than an art form confined to established theatres. The company’s Formations Masterclasses gave artists opportunities to experiment with new operatic works while receiving tutelage from prominent figures in the profession. Participants worked with directors, conductors, composers, and other specialists, turning the development process itself into an important part of Helios’s artistic mission. World-renowned masterclass leaders included Bettina Bartz (dramaturgy), Daniel Kramer (directing), David Parry (conducting), David Pountney (directing), Janis Kelly (singing), Jonathan Moore (writing), Judith Weir (composing), Kasper Holten (directing), Mark Wigglesworth (conducting), Robert Saxton (composing), Stephen Barlow (conducting), and Stephen Unwin (directing).
The company’s cutting-edge programming frequently synergized opera with theatre, dance, visual art, architecture, and multimedia. Ella’s Dido & Belinda, for example, reimagined Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas by emphasizing the relationship between the two central women. Hathaway – Eight Arias for a Bardic Life, written by Briar Kit Esme, explored the life and identity of Anne Hathaway as an empowered, empowering, and agentic individual, rather than treating her merely as William Shakespeare’s wife. The project was jointly commissioned and staged with Buxton Festival and Copenhagen Opera Festival, reflecting Helios’s ability to work with major cultural partners.
Hathaway is simply the most moving production I have ever seen
Copenhagen Opera Festival Audience Feedback
Another notable Helios project was Salon Russe, a collaboration between Helios Collective and Bury Court Opera, held at London’s National Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The event commissioned and premiered four new operatic works, combining music and history in the contextual setting of a major art institution. Helios also worked with Constella OperaBallet on projects that placed lyric theatre and dance on equal terms. This collaborative approach reflected Ella’s conviction that opera could be reshaped through interaction with other creative forms, and that it could reach audiences through the use of atypical performance venues, formats, and collaborative partnerships.
During Ella’s artistic directorship, Helios toured nationally and internationally. Its work reached venues and festivals including the Rose Theatre in Kingston, ENO’s Lilian Baylis House, Glasshouse International Centre for Music (Sage Gateshead), Buxton Festival, Copenhagen Opera Festival, and the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. The company’s activities were therefore both experimental and outward-looking: it developed innovative small-, medium-, and large-scale productions while building relationships across the United Kingdom and Europe. Through Ella’s tenure as the company’s artistic director, Helios provided continuing professional-development opportunities for more than 1,500 artists, as well as commissioning and staging dozens of new operatic works.
Tremendously enjoyable and accomplished … what a delightful operatic experience
The Telegraph, Rupert Christiansen
Ella’s directing style was characterized by theatrical energy, visual imagination, and a willingness to reinterpret familiar material. Reviews of her work frequently highlighted its emotional immediacy and ability to make traditional repertoire feel newly relevant. Her productions included a rock-influenced version of Puccini’s Tosca, a play-opera adaptation of Die Meistersinger, and productions of works by Purcell, Mozart, Verdi, Stravinsky, and Maxwell Davies. Rather than treating the operatic canon as fixed, Ella approached it as material that could be reframed for contemporary performers and audiences.
Helios Collective’s long-term influence can also be understood through the wider career that Ella built afterward. She went on to co-found the Opera Festival of Chicago, Theatre N16, and the charity SWAP’ra, direct the International Opera Awards, and lead global initiatives such as Opera Harmony. Her work has further advanced Helios’s core tenets: international collaboration, support for artists, the development of new works, and the search for more inclusive and imaginative ways of presenting opera.
Cavalier’s Rock Tosca is basically one of the best ideas anyone has ever had. Big, sweaty, loud, and brilliant, rock’s ego-heavy aesthetic is ideal for Puccini’s personality-driven thriller. Ella Marchment’s direction makes the most of this, focusing us on individual characters in turn, keeping the crucial claustrophobic air of persecution in each scene while blasting us with big volume and bigger emotions
Backtrack
Ultimately, Helios Collective was more than a production company. It was a platform for experimentation, professional development, and artistic exchange. Under Ella’s leadership, it treated opera as a collaborative practice rather than a fixed tradition. Its legacy lies in the range of artists it supported, the new works it commissioned, and the ways it encouraged audiences to encounter opera—in theatres, galleries, clubs, festivals, and hybrid performance spaces. Through Helios, Ella established a model of opera direction that was entrepreneurial, interdisciplinary, and strongly focused on the future development of the art form.
Helios Collective – Highlights
- A Celebration Before and After Verdi & Wagner
- Canerentque Aeterna
- Dido & Belinda
- Die Meistersinger
- Façade and Eight Songsfor a Mad King
- Formations Masterclasses
- Hathaway – Eight Arias for a Bardic Life
- Il Letto
- Mozart Mixology
- Salon Russe
- Stravinsky Double Bill
- The Bear Goes Walkabout
- Toi Toi – opera club nights
See also Opera Harmony.
An A–Z of Helios Collective’s Principal Supporters
Helios Collective would like to thank the following individuals and organizations for their support, care, professional guidance, friendship, hard work, and love, and especially for their willingness to embrace traditional and bleeding-edge operatic productions.
Alan Houmann, Alfred & Gina Cutner, Aman & Rachna Kanwar, Annilese Miskimmon, Arts Council England, Beth & Nigel Hankin, Bob & Clare House, Brian O’Malley, Bruce & Sarah Maulevere, Bruce Steinberg & Ashley Dartnell, Bury Court Opera, Buxton Festival, Carol McCann, Caroline Egen, Cate & Andrew Burgess, Cecile Pottier, Cerise Sue-Chue-Lam, Charles & Tessa King-Farlow, Charlotte Holmes, Charlotte Nohavicka, Claire Angus, Copenhagen Opera Festival, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, David & Nancy Zeffman, David Green, Dawn & Chris Noon, Domo & Theo Baal, Ed Smith, Eileen & Andrew Willett, Elizabeth & Paddy Heffernan, Endsleigh Insurance, Eric Marchment, Etienne Duval, Eva Mason, Felix & Miranda Mosley, Francis Moore-Colyer, Francis Mote, Gill Tarlton, Greg Sue-A-Quan, Greta Jones, Help Musicians UK, Henry Southern, Hugo Shirley, Iain Bell, Ian Rosenblatt, Javotte, John Coke & Suzanne Lemieux, John Deathridge, John Kennedy, Josh & Kay Marchment, Karel Kovall, Katie Jones, Keith Sutherland, Kerena Mond, King’s College London, Koos Schouten, L Harris, Laura Hall, Lewis & Norma Cutner, Linda & Richard Allinson, Lionel Steuart-Fothringham, Lord Donoughue, Lord Sassoon, Marc & Katia Pereira-Mendoza, Marianne Matthews, Mark Short, Martin Geyer, Mary Bright, Michael Foot, Michael Moody, Michael Standell, Mimi Doulton, Nicholas Chalmers & Nelson Castellanos, Nick Butt, Nigel Stern, Patrick Holman, Paul & Catherine Thomas, Paul Gambrill, Paula & David Pereira-Mendoza, Penny Carrega, Peter Bull, Peter Moffat & Leo Klein, Peter Parker, Peter Sands & Betsy Tobin, Phyllida Lloyd, Piers Landseer, PRS for Music Foundation, Pumeza Matshikiza, Qudsia Daniels, Regis Huf, Robert & Jennifer Zeffman, Robert Hugill, Russell Hall, Ruth & Nick Green, Simon Whewell, Stephen Barlow, Sue Innes, Sue Odell & Howard Lee, Susan Hall, T Andrewes, The Fenton Trust, The Fidelio Charitable Trust, The Glasshouse International Centre for Music (Sage Gateshead), The Hinrichsen Foundation, The International Opera Awards, The Mariinsky Theatre, The National Portrait Gallery, The Rose Theatre Kingston, The RVW Trust, The William Walton Trust, Tracy Marchment, VJ Ford, Xanthe & Ivo Mosley.