That’s also true of Sydney Chamber Opera, which has pioneered a more uncompromising form of opera over the last few years. Somehow, after 70 minutes of experimentation and invention, the women on stage have found a way forward as individuals and as a group, crafting a new expression. There are times in the work where the sense of trauma and suffocation is nearly overwhelming, but by the end we find ourselves very much looking toward the light. Jacobs and Ricketson have carefully orchestrated just about everything, except for your emotional response. The work isn’t so much about how we understand these tableaus as a collective, but the kind of thoughts and music they throw forth for each individual audience member. There are moments that are aurally and visually confronting and discomfiting, and others that are sublimely beautiful and meditative in their impact. ∺s she and Ricketson present a series of simple but richly evocative images and sounds, they’re inviting the audience to look inward. The Howling Girls inhabits a space which is seemingly alien, at once primordial and futuristic, a fantasy of new possibilities for language and gender, a landscape of sensations, a monument and a void which gives way to something new.ĪDENA JACOBS, DIRECTOR & DAMIEN RICKETSON, COMPOSER Beginning with the lungs: the engine room of the voice where the first transformation from mind to matter occurs with the squeeze of this bodily bladder of air - channelled into the throat: the fleshy organ pipe-cum-string instrument translating energy into vibration - to the crucible of the mouth and its attempt to forge this plasmic substance into an articulate mass - to its final expulsion from the lips in a rupture from the body to the outside world.įor us, this experiential work functions as a ritual or purgation, in which the desire of reconstituting the voice is performed. The work unfolds in the trajectory of a single utterance. Featuring a solitary soprano and a throbbing chorus of young voices, together with an immersive orchestration of theremin, keyboards and electroacoustic music, the score itself is a kind of proto-language, an attempt to communicate in a mode beyond the rational: a sensory spectacle to bypass the brain and work directly on the body. The Howling Girls explores the medium and metaphor of the voice. Elaine Showalter writes ‘Historically linked with femininity for hundreds of years, hysteria’s involuntary, uncontrollable, somatic symptoms were coming to be understood in the emerging critical feminist discourse not as a medical condition but a cultural one, an embodied index of forms of oppression.’ Robert Woolsey, a medical historian, considers hysteria to be a ‘protolanguage’ whose symptoms are ‘a code used by a patient to communicate a message which, for various reasons, cannot be verbalised.’ Within feminist discourse, it has been understood both as a means of controlling the female subject, and as a subversive force, a space of resistance which can disrupt and undermine the patriarchal order. Hysteria is controversial and mysterious territory. Perhaps this is also a story which echoes a another collective trauma, that is the history of female ‘hysteria,’ a history of not being believed, of speaking a language deemed irrational and unintelligible. Perhaps this anecdote is a metaphor for violation, the sense of being permeable, the terror that sets in when the familiar systems are collapsing - a larger trauma re-inscribed on the body and on the voice. Five young women witness a collective trauma that is impossible to digest. This haunting image became the seed for The Howling Girls. But he could find no obstruction, no debris, and needless to say, no body parts.’ (Susan Faludi in The Terror Dream, recounting Judith Greenberg’s anthology Trauma At Home). The ear, nose, and throat surgeon who examined the girls discovered that their throats were, indeed, constricted. All five believed that some debris or body part from the destruction of the towers had lodged in their throats and produced the symptom. They were wasting away because they couldn’t ‘swallow’. ‘In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre.five gaunt teenage girls had arrived separately at a Manhattan hospital complaining of identical symptoms.
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