Film performance

Film performance is a brand new opera exploring the intrinsic physicality of musical performance and the odd comical ways in which we interacted with cameras over the pandemic.

A musical response to the short film Film (a 1965 collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton), this work uses microphones and cameras on stage to create electroacoustic sounds and a film projection in real time. Everyday objects featured in Film are brought to the stage and turned into sound-making devices. The show is composed of a series of solos. Each solo focuses on a specific combination of objects featured in the short-film, from a newspaper and a hat to a fish tank and a bird cage, combining the sounds produced with these objects with vocal, instrumental and electroacoustic sounds. 

We embrace Keaton’s breathtaking physicality when examining sound-making physical actions in the aim of challenging stereotyped conceptions of voice types and gender in opera. Film performance addresses the phenomenological enquiry around perception and self-awareness explored through the figure of the doppelgänger in Film, transposed to daily interactions with webcams over the pandemic.