This summer, prepare for GO WILDERNESS!

This August, GO OPERA will be packing their many things and re-locating to a verdant, fairytale landscape at Wilderness Festival.

From the 12th – 14th August, 2011, Wilderness will be providing happy campers with a smörgåsbord of performances, fireside banquets and theatrical spectaculars set amongst the stunning lakes and meadows of the ancient Wychwood Forest.

Curated by the organisers of Secret Garden Party and Lovebox (so you know it’s good…), Wilderness will be a weekend packed with inspiration for all you free-spirited festival lovers and will embrace the best of the best in music, food, theatre, literary debate and outdoor pursuits.

GO OPERA will be performing excerpts of our sell-out show, GO TRAVIATA!, in various different guises and locations across the weekend – so we do hope you’ll join us and have a sing along (or a hum along, or just come along).

To get your tickets, follow THIS link – they start from a mere £27.50 for a day ticket and £49.50 for the weekend (plus booking fee). Proper bargain!

Check out the Wilderness Video to give you a flavour of the good times to come and we’ll see you in August!

GO TEAM

This Friday 24th June, GO OPERA is proud to announce that they will be teaming up with the creators of last year’s hugely successful Cineroleum project to perform a short excerpt of GO TRAVIATA at the opening night of their Folly for a Flyover Festival!

Check out this June/July's must-see event!

The wonderful people at Folly for a Flyover will host a six week programme of cinema, performance and play, including boat tours, screenings and drop-in workshops,  produced by Assemble CIC in conjunction with CREATE 2011 and The Barbican Art Gallery.

GO has also joined forces with filmmaker Tom Chick, who will be providing a custom-made, cinematic translation to accompany the performance.

We are so excited to be able to return to The Wick so soon after the final performance of our as it proved to be (as we suspected it would) such a fertile and creative stomping ground for new and exciting events. Without a shadow of a doubt, Folly For a Flyover will prove to be up there with some of the best, most varied and interesting projects to see there this summer.

So get on down there!

GO TEAM

http://www.oikosproject.com/the-jellyfish-theatre/

“‘Projects like the 2012 London Olympics have promised public engagement….yet the entire Olympics site is walled and strictly out of bounds. We’re a completely open stage, trying to prove that local people can create their own public projects. We found our own site by walking around, found Martin and Folke by asking around, asked Southwark if it was possible. And off we went. You can do it, too, without developers, quangos, huge professional teams – and with anyone taking part.”‘

- Red Room producer Bryan Savery in Junkitecture and the Jellyfish theatre by Jonathan Glancey.

Diva (1981) Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez sings the aria “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” from Act I of Catalani’s opera La Wally.

According to Arthus Groos, Violetta’s death of pulmonary tuberculosis in Verdi’s La Traviata was the first of its kind in opera. Tuberculosis exerted a similar mythological hold on the cultural imagination in the 19th century as AIDS and cancer exerted over the 20th Susan Sontag suggests in Illness as Metaphor (1979). Around each disease there is cultivated a slew of metaphoric and figurative associations. Sufferers of TB revel in excessive passions, cancer victims repress and the ramifications are internal: malignant vacuous growths. AIDS kills men for who sex is pure pleasure, those thoughtless of mankind’s reproductive future: a death drive fixation.

Groos is keen to suggest, with an example drawn straight from fiction, that contemporary audiences might experience some sort of cognitive dissonance in watching beautiful, paling women die, apparently, of just a bad cough.

‘One of the central events of the film Moonstruck (1987) takes place in a performance of La bohème at the Metropolitan Opera. Loretta (Cher) is puzzled by what seems to be Mimi’s unexpected death (….)

“You know, I didn’t think she was going to die! I knew she was sick!”

“She had TB.”

“I know. I mean she was coughing her brains out. Right? And still she had to keep singing!”

Most of us will smile indulgently at a first-time opera-goer’s ingenuous conflation of character (‘coughing her brains out’) and voice (‘keep singing’)….’[1]

Moonstruck (1987) at La Bohème: Cher and Nicolas Cage

I know I’m always smiling indulgently at a first-time opera-goer’s ingenuous conflation of character and voice.

People were always dying of TB in the 19th century literature, like Marguerite in Alexandre Dumas, fils’s La dame aux camellias (1852) – the text that would later be adapted by Verdi to become La Traviata. In his adaptation Marguerite is renamed, becoming Violetta. The tuberculosis epidemic in Europe had reached its peak in the 1850s. By the early eighteen hundreds, ‘TB was the most common cause of death by single disease.’

Yet as the source of the disease was unclear and its manifestations varying there was much speculation as to its causation: probably too much sex, too much drink and precious little moral fibre. As TB is a highly contagious bacterial disease and ventilation in 19th century buildings was extremely poor, entire families often were plagued with the affliction. As a result, doctors concluded, TB was probably hereditary.

As Groos notes, ‘Consumption in the mid-nineteenth century thus signified a particular disease that could be diagnosed but whose origin and cure remained unknown and could be attributed to a wide variety of factors. As a result, the illness -to use Susan Sontag’s phrase -became a metaphor, a means of constructing character.’

Curiously, Groos continues, as the metaphors that proliferated around the disease became cultural short-hand for all sorts of pernicious characters traits, cultural manifestations of TB were also gendered. Whilst dying women became beautiful, pale waifs, who delicately coughed a little blood on a lover’s white handkerchief, men with TB were just extremely creative. Naturally.

HELLO, welcome to GO OPERA’s website. Perhaps you’re wondering what we’re all about. This blog will feature regular production updates, a little cultural commentary and a brief introduction to our cast, crew and directorial team.

GO OPERA is a hopeful, young collective. Creative producers Elly Condron and Dominic Kraemer have brought together a team of exceptional technical talent. GO OPERA believes that there are new audiences for the opera. Our productions will last no more than 90 minutes. Our productions will be affordable. They will take place beyond the confines of conventional establishments, in places only of our own making. As we construct, dramatise and perform operatic fiction in the cultural margin, we aim to dismantle prevailing misapprehensions about an art form we find utterly intoxicating, transgressive and beautiful.

On these pages we’ll be writing about all aspects of our production process: how our architects hope to erect our transient performance space, the keen engagement of our excellent musicians and how each of the collective views the current work within the wider creative context. We’ll be looking specifically at how our piece engages with La Traviata’s history as well as how our operation functions in London’s current cultural and political climate.

Our first production, GO TRAVIATA, is a streamlined version of Verdi’s masterpiece which follows the life of a Parisian courtesan trying to cope with complex emotions and the harsh blows that life has dealt her. Free up your diaries for one of the following dates:

June 1st-4th, 10th and 11th.