BY SAMUEL HODGE
Artist Samuel Hodge has spent this week in rehearsals at Carriageworks, in the company of new Sydney Chamber Opera creative collaborators: director Adena Jacobs, composer Damien Ricketson, soprano Jane Sheldon, SCO artistic director Jack Symonds, and the teenage chorus of this production, The Howling Girls.
This collaboration between artist/image-maker and performance-makers is unique. SCO and Carriageworks invited Samuel to interpret the creative process through an artist’s lens to foster cross-genre creativity, and he shares this vision with us here.
The Howling Girls is interpreted here and connects with my artistic practice as one that deals with the fragments of trauma – a perfect fit. It echoes how we process these moments and then, how we try to reorient these experiences through other forms; generally later.
The processing of these fragments is represented in a variety of mediums over time. A sort of piecing back together again that, in the end, rebirths the same but very different Pet Sematary-style outcomes. These mutations further destabilise our understandings of what I/we/you consider to be right or wrong.
This lays the foundations of this series of artworks I’ve created for the Sydney Chamber Opera. A surprisingly rare and wonderful collaboration that exists beyond a mere commission and where, as an artist, I get to extend my own mutating, never ending and finished or unfinished, body of work.
Gallery
About the world premiere of The Howling Girls by Damien Ricketson and Adena Jacobs
In the weeks following Sept 11, five young women present separately to hospitals in New York with identical symptoms. They are unable to swallow, and believe that some debris or body part from the destruction has lodged in their throats. The surgeon who examines them finds no obstruction.
The Howling Girls is a new chamber opera dissecting the medium and metaphor of the voice, its loss and attempted reconstitution. A solo voice constricted, wheezing, stammering, in decay, a teenage chorus of howling girls, an absent mass, an unearthly theremin, a spectacle of fragmented bodies and voices.
About the team
Composer
- Damien Ricketson
Musical Director
- Jack Symonds
Director
- Adena Jacobs
Set & Costume Design
- Eugyeene Teh
Lighting Design
- Jenny Hector
Sound Design
- Bob Scott
With
- Jane Sheldon and teenagers from
The House that Dan Built: Grace Campbell,
Kittu Hoyne, Kiri Jenssen, Emily Pincock,
Jayden Selvakumaraswamy, Sylvie Woodhouse
Dates
- 8pm 3, 4, 6, and 7 April 2018
Venue
- Carriageworks Bay 20, 245 Wilson St Eveleigh
Tickets
- $35 Available here.
