|
|
|
[XXX Live Nude Girls] is a powerful piece, driven by the discrepancy between the shiny, fashionable world of Barbie and the grainy reality of Walshe's music. The musicians scratch at their instruments, exploring Walshe's trademark lo-fi white noise. When they do finally burst into cheesy melody, it forms a disturbingly inappropriate accompaniment to the rape scene with which the opera climaxes. The Guardian, 24 Oct 2003 Apartment House is performing the work at the following festivals: world première: 5 October 2003, Dresden New Music Days world première of British première: 15 November 2003, Oxford
The idea behind it all comes from several things. I was thinking about when I was a kid and we would play with Barbie-type dolls. We would make these incredibly complex soap-opera plotlines with lots of death and violence and sex. It was all very dramatic. We didn't have a Ken, so we took one Barbie and cut her hair and drew on some stubble and dressed "Ken" in Barbie's most masculine outfit - a pink velour trouser-suit. "Ken" was then expected to go to bed with the other Barbies. I've been talking to lots of people about how they played with Barbies, and they all did the same things, which I find pretty interesting - generally, little girls playing with dolls is regarded as something very nice and innocent. I don't really like dolls at all, but I liked playing with Barbies because you could create these massive stories and they also had pretty amazing accessories - we had a kitchen with tiny casserole dishes and little spatulas. There's a lot that has been written about the fact that Barbies don't look like regular women, but this was not really an issue for us when we were kids; bizarrely, because of the accessories and the clothes, Barbies came closer to reality than Lego or Transformers or stuffed toys. I've been thinking about writing a larger-scale work for ages which could have elements of narrative and characters (however fantastical) but I didn't want to have opera singers or people acting on-stage and then I was reading about these Mozart marionette operas about a year ago and realised the idea of having a Barbie opera actually had some precedents. This was quite exciting and amusing at the same time. The instrumentation is: two vocalists (not opera singers, people who do improvisation and extended techniques), five instrumentalists, two video-camera operators, two Barbie-manipulators. You have the Dream House (the house where Barbie lives - it's about 4 feet high, and open at the front, very easy to see into, much bigger than a normal doll's house) in the centre of the stage. The two people moving the Barbies are kneeling/sitting on the ground in front. The two camera operators move around behind them. The musicians are scattered around the stage. There are two screens on either side of the Dream House, which relay the video images. The images on the screen should be life-size if possible. Watching kids playing with dolls or teddybears is pretty fascinating, and I really like the idea of making a piece which has a very interesting visual aspect, seeing all these little dolls and tiny accessories blown up on a video screen to life size. My idea is to create a piece about 35 minutes long. The music does not have to lock in with what's going on visually all the time. The singers sometimes have text (which I will choose/write), sometimes not. There is a narrative thread under the whole thing, sometimes it comes to the surface, at other times there are diversions from it. The performers (whether musical, video or doll) all have scores, with moments of controlled improvisation embedded in strict notation. Everybody uses Barbies or bits of them to play their instruments or make sounds at times. © Jenny Walshe, March 2003
|
|||
