No Man Is an Island—A Decade On? Interview with Mimi Doulton
‘My temperature monitor reads 31.2 degrees.’
‘I’m on 31.4,’ says the voice coming from my laptop screen.
Gushing with sweat, I think of an image my interviewee reposted the night before from the GreenpeaceUK account: ‘the thing about climate change is that it doesn’t really care if you believe in it or not.’
It is in this sweltering heat that I interview British-Pakistani soprano Mimi Doulton. Based in Stuttgart since 2020, Doulton specialises in 20th and 21st century repertoire, with recent engagements at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Opernhaus Zürich, Staatsoper Hamburg and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Alongside her performing career, she volunteers with Freelancers Make Theatre Work, advocating for the rights of freelance workers in the arts.
Her upcoming concert ‘No Man Is An Island’ takes place on 1 July at Rich Mix in London, part of Spitalfields Music Festival. Featuring a documentary by Mladen Ivanović and three new music commissions from Linda Buckley, Krõõt-Kärt Kaev and Elaine Mitchener, the evening explores the legacy of Brexit—ten years on from the referendum—as well as what it means to be European today.
This is not my first conversation with Doulton. She was one of the first people I interviewed in English back in 2023 when we were both students at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse. That fledgling piece of cultural reporting touched on themes such as the identity of British new music, its representation at Darmstadt and the challenges following the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. In a way, today’s conversation feels like a continuation of those threads where Doulton talks about her Brexile story, the economics of cultural exchange across a post-Brexit Europe and the concert she has built in response.
Marat Ingeldeev: I’d like to begin with a quote from our last interview at Darmstadt Ferienkurse in 2023. ‘I find it very frustrating how isolated Britain is in the bigger scale of contemporary music. I hope that during my career I’ll be able to find ways to bring artists from across Europe, including the UK, together.’ It’s been three years—has your perspective changed?
Mimi Doulton: I think my perspective already was changing during that Darmstadt because there were so many British and British-based international artists there. But now it’s a harder question to answer… I’ve been gone for such a long time that I have less skin in the game with the UK scene. From what I’ve seen, there seems to be a group of UK artists—composers and performers—who are performing in Europe quite regularly. I’d be interested to know if you agree, because you go to so many things as part of your job. The thing that’s got even more difficult in the last three years—and it was already difficult for British artists—is money. We’ve gone from a situation where the UK doesn’t have any cultural funding to a situation where no one has any cultural funding. I still have this vision of trying to find ways for collaboration between British and European artists, but it is getting harder to achieve. The vision then was that countries like Germany and France had so much money for the arts that we could siphon it into projects in the UK, or bring British projects to Europe. But now, both of those countries are experiencing really big funding cuts.
MI: Could you say more about those cuts? I’ve heard the Berlin culture budget took a serious hit.
MD: I can definitely talk about Germany but not France with any authority—that’s word of mouth from talking to artists there. In Germany, as you said, Berlin’s had big budget cuts. A lot of smaller and grassroots music venues are about to close or already have closed. It’s affected the artistic ecosystem at every level, even the very top—big opera houses and theaters. Here in Stuttgart, there’s a similar thing going on. In Austria there’s also been huge cuts: I was working there earlier this year, trying to commission a new piece, and getting funding was really challenging. And there’s been closures there too. The first one that jumps to mind is the Wiener Kammeroper, which has just shut down. If even the opera houses—normally some of the most well-funded organisations, and someone’s going to kill me for saying that—are suffering, that means the small grassroots stuff is suffering more.
MI: Before we go further, can you tell us your own story with Germany and Brexit?
MD: In 2018, I finished a master’s at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and started freelancing. The UK referendum had already happened by that point, but there was still this national sense that Brexit might not actually happen—and then very suddenly it did. Then came Covid—that was the real catalyst to move, because I lost all my work like everyone else... The thing that might hold one back from moving is having a comfortable working life already. That was all gone, so I thought, I’ll go and see what happens. I moved to Germany in September 2020. The deal was that if you were living in an EU state before 31 December 2020, you were entitled to a visa for five years, which would automatically become permanent residency if you followed all the rules.
MI: Did you manage to secure that visa?
MD: Yes, the first visa was quite straightforward. Getting permanent residency more recently has been more of an ordeal, but I do now have it. For artists coming now, post-Brexit, getting a visa is a completely different—and more complicated—ball game, sadly. I’d planned to only come for six months. But three weeks after I arrived we went into lockdown—and November, December, January and February kind of didn’t happen. I got to the end of my six months having barely left the house, teaching English online and doing proofreading to make some money. I didn’t feel like I’d given it a go, so I stayed a bit longer. It wasn’t till 2022 that I started getting singing work here. The first few jobs I got in Europe were with British companies or ensembles performing here—they thought I’d be easier to hire because I had a visa... I didn’t realise when I moved that I was pressing restart on my career: I hadn’t studied here, I had no contacts, nobody knew who I was. And if I’d known that, would I have come?
MI: Do you ever regret it or think how your life would have gone had you not made that decision?
MD: I thought about it a lot this week—it was ten years since the Brexit referendum yesterday. You’ve also moved, Marat, so you know how it feels. In so many ways it makes your life richer, makes you a more confident person, because you have to navigate all this bureaucracy by yourself. You can’t just ring a relative or a friend who’s done it before. So you do all this stuff yourself and feel like, Okay, I’m quite tough, I can do this. But there’s also a whole load of things that take your confidence and your sense of security away: applying for visas, rules that you don’t know, the fact you’re not allowed to vote—which feels quite destabilising, especially right now. On every level of life, being foreign is more difficult. And I already spoke German, so I’m lucky compared to most.
MI: That vision of bringing people together clearly still matters to you. How does your upcoming concert connect to it?
MD: It’s still important to me, but as I said, it is hard. This project has been quite fortunate with funders, and they’re three fantastic composers—which really helps. But there are so many logistical things to consider. Generally, if I wanted to bring people over here from the UK for another project, or from a country that’s not in the EU—Serbia, for instance—there is so much to think about: visas, traveling with instruments, social security. If I go to a festival and say I want to bring these three people over from the UK, their first question is often, Does it require any extra paperwork? You asked before we started recording, Where are all the emerging artists? I think they’re stuck behind this bureaucracy. But they’re also stuck behind the fact that no one has enough money to take a risk on an unknown quantity right now.
MI: Despite European money drying up, British-based musicians are still making it to Europe: GBSR Duo and Natasha Barrett at Darmstadt 2025, Francesca Fargion at Borealis 2026, Rosie Middleton and Personal Clutter at Klang 2026. The bad news is that Graham McKenzie told me HCMF lost £120,000 last year because of the Conservative government pulling the plug on Creative Europe…
MD: Losing access to Creative Europe funding is a big blow, especially, I think, the mobility grants. This whole idea I had of bringing artists from different countries to work together—there is Creative Europe funding specifically to do that: spend three weeks in another country, get to know the community, make work. But the UK is exempt from the scheme now. We also don’t really know how much work we’re losing because of Brexit, because we’re not being asked to do it. We don’t know how often festivals, casting directors or orchestra managers are choosing not to hire someone because they’re British. We only get anecdotal evidence. There are stories of people losing work because of visa fuck-ups, but I don’t think we’ll ever know the bigger picture. There was an article in the Guardian recently about how more than a quarter of UK musicians lost all EU work since 2021. And it isn’t just performers of course; through volunteering with Freelancers Make Theatre Work, there are quite frequent messages about people working in costume or technical roles struggling to get visas, or not being taken on European tours of plays and musicals because of the 90/180 limit. This used to be a significant part of people’s income, and touring to the US isn’t any easier right now.
MI: What music will we hear on Wednesday and how does it connect to the topic of Europe?
MD: I gave the composers all the same brief: reflect on the meaning of ‘being European’ and how Europe’s changed over the last 10 years. This could be about the referendum, but it could also be the war in Ukraine, climate change or the rise of populism.
The first piece is by Linda Buckley, who is Irish and lives in Scotland. The effect of Brexit on the Isle of Ireland has been momentous and no one really wanted to talk about it seriously during the referendum campaign. Linda’s chosen a text by John Donne: ‘no man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ It was quoted a few times around the referendum—and connected to that in my head is Theresa May saying ‘if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.’ Such a terrible thing to say. The piece is for voice and electronics, a meditative, immersive soundscape in four-channel sound with long, expansive lines. There’s a section in the middle inspired by Sean-nós singing, traditional Irish folk singing. There’s something slightly haunting about it and it’s very cathartic to sing. I hope it’s also cathartic to listen to.
The second piece is by Krõõt-Kärt Kaev, an Estonian composer living in Hamburg. She normally draws on other people’s work to make something new, and I thought that could be an interesting way to look at European history. It’s called ‘Tears Apart’—you can read ‘tears’ both ways. The central inspiration is ‘Flow My Tears’ by John Dowland, and there are references to Purcell and Fauré as well. We have two cassette recorders playing tapes, which I’m controlling, and I have a DJ solo in the middle. It is a lament, trying to recreate a profound depression—that kind of numbness to all the pain of the world, which is hard to do with music because it’s inherently emotive. And then flashes of other emotions: anger and unabashed joy. The DJ solo is kind of like DJing the end of the world.
The next thing on the programme is a documentary by Montenegrin filmmaker Mladen Ivanović, made as part of the Balkan Affairs project at Eclat in Stuttgart and the Zagreb Biennale—seven documentaries interviewing people from the former states of Yugoslavia, plus expatriates. There was so much that resonated with what we’re trying to explore. I wrote to Mladen asking if he’d consider cutting an eight-minute version, told him what the project was about, and he said, I can totally see the resonance, yes. Music is wonderful for expressing emotions about Europe right now without articulating them in words—but it’s nice to have something in there that presents people’s thoughts more directly.
The last piece is ‘Abode’ by Elaine Mitchener, a score that gives me a lot of freedom of interpretation. Elaine interviewed me extensively about my experiences of moving and making home and brought all that into the score—so it’s quite autobiographical in a way. There’s also a section on the politics of hatred, not just in the UK but in the EU: how people who are ‘other’ are perceived and discriminated against in Europe. Politics is changing at such a fast pace at the moment that I suspect each performance of this piece over the next 10 months will have a very different flavour!
MI: It sometimes annoys me that people take the music and leave the context behind. There’s so much that goes into the work being made, and it’s easier not to talk about difficult things—people don’t want to upset anyone. But I really can’t separate the two.
MD: I’m going to start by saying people whose artistic work I really respect have said this. But it frustrates me too when people say their music isn’t political, firstly because it often is even if they don’t realise it. I don’t think writers and visual artists are saying that though—so what’s different about us? And we’re funded by people’s taxes, which gives us a responsibility to reflect society back to them. We don’t exist in a vacuum. When I came up with this project, there were festivals who said, That’s too political—we don’t want that. But there are thankfully festival directors who want to engage with politics, who in some cases want to resist what’s being imposed on them by governments in terms of what we’re allowed to talk about.
MI: In a recent Instagram post you raised the question of what a common European identity actually means. People say these words as if everybody else is expected to understand what they mean. Maybe you have an answer?
MD: I remember saying I am voting remain because I want to be European—but what does that mean? It emotionally did mean something at the time... When I started coming up with this project, a colleague said to me, How do you do it without minimizing or diminishing the people who voted for Brexit? That was a really good question and it’s been in my head the whole time. It’s what pushed me to take a wider look at Europe and not just focus on Brexit, because the politics that surround Brexit are happening everywhere in Europe right now.
I don’t have an answer to the identity question myself. But I have asked a lot of other people over the last four years. Once on a bus from Belgrade to Zagreb, a young woman struck up a conversation with me—ironically whilst helping me navigate border control on foot—and she turned out to be a Serbian nationalist, very anti-EU. Interestingly, I had a conversation with a pro-EU colleague the other week who asked me, Is it any more than a set of trade agreements? Of course you meet lots of people who have emotional ideals about what Europe is as well. I always try to listen… If you shout at people you get nowhere. If you listen to them first, then they let you talk and they listen back. You find a place in the middle, at least for the course of that conversation. I don’t think it necessarily achieves change, but it probably achieves more than shouting at each other.
MI: Do you feel European?
MD: When I started getting busy over here—Switzerland one week, France, Germany, then the Eurostar to England—I felt very European. That romanticised idea of going everywhere by train, border-free travel, which is becoming less and less of a thing: in Germany you always get your passport checked now. But there’s the EU and there’s Europe—and they’re two different things.
MI: Europe means something specific to me: a political space that could offer an alternative to the trends coming from geographical east and west. Brexit was perhaps one of the first gusts of those changes. Sure, Europe is also in crisis—but maybe this is a moment where it can reimagine itself.
MD: What I’ve noticed is that those who identify as European generally want to be part of something bigger—an interconnected society, able to share culture, ideas. And people who don’t think about Europe in that way are following this increasingly common, nationalistic, each-man-for-himself politics. Last night, I watched the documentary the BBC’s just put out about Brexit, interviewing all the ‘lovely’ politicians who were in charge around then. They showed footage from the campaign and I think it was David Cameron who said, Do we want to be little England or do we want to be Great Britain? There’s part of me that is furious that it was all reduced to emotions, because the problems Brexit’s caused are logistical problems. But it felt emotional at the time didn’t it? Hindsight… It does make me wonder how we’re going to look back on the last few years and the actions we have or haven’t taken.
MI: Phew. Let’s check the temperature. I’m still on 31.2 degrees.
MD: I’m on 32.2—I’ve gained a whole degree on you while we’ve been talking!
Mimi Doulton’s upcoming concert takes place on 1 July 2026 at Rich Mix in London. For more information, visit https://richmix.org.uk/live-events/spitalfields-music-festival-2026/