"like nothing you've ever heard before"
- NY Times
Drama
Adult Themes
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Doting mother Lumee and her daughter Bibi live isolated, in a pristine​ sanctuary. Bibi and Lumee are trying to protect each other from the danger that lurks outside their door.
Winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2019, and written just before #metoo,
p r i s m explores the elasticity of memory after the trauma of a sexual assault, and the extent to which we will go to try to make it all better.
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About the music:
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ELLEN REID'S Pulitzer Prize-winning opera p r i s m features a haunting and kaleidoscopic musical landscape. The score erupts with vibrant colors, utilising innovative choral and orchestral techniques to create a distinct sonic world. Reid's composition seamlessly weaves together seemingly disconnected musical styles through leitmotifs and ostinatos.
The music employs electronic manipulation, diverse timbres, and extended techniques to magnify differences between similar musical styles. This vertiginous juxtaposition of musical elements reflects the opera's themes of trauma, memory, and healing, demanding a vast range of musical expression.
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About the words:
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ROXIE PERKINS' libretto for p r i s m explores the aftermath of sexual trauma through a non-linear narrative. The story follows Bibi and her mother Lumee, trapped in a sterile room, grappling with a mysterious illness. Perkins employs invented vocabulary and fractured language to convey the disorienting experience of PTSD.
The libretto's triptych structure and vivid use of colour as emotional triggers offer a window into the sensory world of trauma survivors. Ultimately, the text examines how the stories we tell ourselves to cope can become more harmful than the trauma they disguise.​​​
When
Fri 21 Feb 8pm
Tue 25 Feb 8pm
Fri 28 Feb 8pm
Where
PAC Theatre
570 Victoria Street
North Melbourne
Duration
2 hours + 20min interval
Other performances
Sanatorium Express
Arriving at a peculiar resort-sanatorium, a woman's plans for weight loss in a weekend to save her marriage are hilariously derailed, when her husband unexpectedly checks in. Lured by a Healer with a reputation for a quick fix, an array of unique and entertaining characters struggling with the complexities of modern life soon realise their healing is not as straightforward as they thought.
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Poking fun at the wellness industry and our contemporary obsessions with perfection, flaws and fads, Sanatorium Express takes us on a surprisingly sentimental and uplifting journey.
Soldier Songs
Soldier Songs - 'an opera in the form of a song cycle' - depicts that solitude of a soldier’s experience: one isolated baritone stands alone in this piece and reflects a single vulnerability that speaks for generations.
But more powerfully, Soldier Songs deals with the crisis of communicable experience: the soldiers who return from war unable to bear witness to their chaotic memories.​​