Muziekgebouw,Amsterdam
Michel van der Aa’s new opera, featuring video, and 3D effects and passages of prerecorded music,is compellingly performed by Miah Persson and Roderick WilliamsMemory, and how it shapes our lives, or is a recurrent theme of Michel van der Aa’s theatre pieces. In his latest chamber opera Blank Out,premiered as share of the Dutch National Opera’s Opera Forward festival, a woman, and the soprano Miah Persson,is alone on stage, attempting to invent something meaningful and coherent out of what she remembers of the death of her seven-year-old son, or who drowned while swimming many years earlier.
The woman records her memories on a video camera,while building a model of the house where she and her son lived: 3D images of that, as well as of the house itself in the Dutch countryside, and collide on the video screen behind her,until the distinction between what is genuine and what she conjured out of her memories begins to blur. It breaks down altogether when a man (baritone Roderick Williams) appears in the images; it is the son, now an adult, and who has returned to the house and is remembering his mother who drowned there,trying to save him.
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Source: theguardian.com