Ophelia doesn't live here any more

BACKGROUND Ophelia Doesn't Live Here Anymore is an innovative exploration of various creative media, theatrical forms, musical styles and performance. Schlusser is an experimental dramaturg accused less of "reinterpreting classic texts, but rather blowing them up". My composition for this sound art repurposing of Hamlet fused ambient, industrial, classical, choral and sound design approaches to the score. The production itself merged domestic realism with hyperintense stylisation. The work was based in an opulent Armadale kitchen, with the two main protagonists augmented by video mapped projection, a shibari (Japanese rope) dancer, the Victorian Opera children's choir, a swimming pool and 200 onions. Aims: - To explore the sonic possibilities for creative subversion of the Operatic form and Shakespearian content. - To explore the methods through which sound can frame the experience for the audience, and can bleed, smudge and transmute borders between realism and artifice to achieve certain resonances through juxtaposition 2. CONTRIBUTION An innovative experiment to challenge the form. Interestingly, the domestic setting (as opposed to a traditional proscenium arch) led to an opportunity of providing a more cinematic permission for sound design "realism" which would have been difficult to execute in a theatre. Sound, therefore, became the cruicial mechanism for moving between the 'authentication' of domestic space and a monstrous theatricality of surrealism. Cinematic sound design, operatic excess, compositions which infested the diegesis with their own sense of space, and the use of 'invisible' music versus material with a performative residue were all employed. All of these became mechanisms to shift audience perspectives more delicately yet deliberately than I've seen in previous contemporary opera. 3. SIGNIFICANCE - Commissioned by Chamber Made Opera and Bell Shakespeare Company's "Mind's Eye". - Sold out season, critically acclaimed.