A piece dedicated to questioning gender hierarchy within the opera industry and its gendered role on and off stage.

Coproduction Opera Ballet Vlaanderen VONK & Muziektheater Transparant
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In the world-famous opera La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini, the audience is not given much information about the interior world of main character Mimì. Like her predecessors and successors, she is rather a metaphor or silhouette. Behind the scenes, opera houses rely heavily on the contribution of women as well, but they are rarely offered positions of leadership. SOLA SOLETTA examines these gender-related hierarchies in both a socially critical and poetic manner. In a collaboration with composer Ezequiel Menalled (ARG), traditional bel canto is combined with contemporary singing techniques to create a brand new score.

The APNEA ARIA was a chance to redefine a typical operatic death scene, often composed to female heroines, and examine it under a microscope by stretching it out. At a moment in time when we were faced with a global respiratory pandemic, the suffocation and murder of George Floyd (among others), and we had just started to feel some shifts after the MeToo movement, it felt inappropriate to support romanticised deaths in opera and necessary to reveal what affect this representation has on audience members. The APNEA ARIA is a ten minute death scene which travels through atmospheric sounds, the confusion of the breath, the inability to breathe, the calling out for a mother, and the finishing of a life. Breath Art was the medium by which a musical language was presented, which made it possible that a story of suffocation could be better understood.
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