The last couple of months have been some of my lightest blogging ever – and there’s a pretty good reason behind that. I’m lucky enough to be friends with the wonderful Hel Gurney – performance poet, fiction/non-fiction writer, researcher and activist – and, last year, we decided to write an opera – Hel taking care of the words, I the music.
So that is what I’ve been doing. It was, unsurprisingly, intense. And now we have an opera, The Lion-Faced Man, opening with Tete a Tete Opera Festival at King’s Place this August, performed by incredible mezzo Alison Wells.
We had long wanted to collaborate on a piece exploring difference and looking. With The Lion-Faced Man, we felt there was an opportunity to tackle the audience’s assumptions and completely reverse them. Instead of watching a captive performer, the audience is made captive themselves – strapped into a viewing headset, unable to look away as Stephan Bibrowski, the lion-faced man, stares them down. The singer barrels through a litany of characters – doctor, ringmaster, narrator, side-show spectators, the titular man himself – one single voice contorting through speech and song to populate Stephan’s world. How does looking change the substance of what we see, and how are we changed in the looking? Where does biography end and fiction begin?
Hel and I will be discussing this in greater depth over the next couple of weeks – but I wanted to share the good news, and give a heads up for anyone interested in the UK – tickets are extremely limited and selling fast.
Any questions? Let us know. I’ll be back with a more regular blog next week – until then, it’s more opera for me.
Filed under: classical music, London
