singing eye > Tattooed Tongues

Tattooed Tongues 2002
Briar Rose revisited
or: The Mechanics of Angel.ness

Libretto Friso Haverkamp
Music Martijn Padding
performed by LOOS ensemble, Claron McFadden, Jacek Laszczkowski, Frans Fiselier
conducted by Wojcieh Michniewski
Stage direction Friso Haverkamp
Stage design / video Rob van der Poel
Live video performance Mendel Hardeman

An opera dedicated to the Swedish mysticist and "angologist" Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 - 1772). In 13 scenes, creating an image of Swedenborg's intimate relation with angels, his view on what others call Enlightenment, and his ambition to undo the fall in the Garden of Eden.

For the performances in Stadschouwburg Rotterdam and Vredenburg, Utrecht, I was asked to take the role of the Swedenborg Adept, the person who, in Swedenborg's place, now dreams his dream. The person in whom's head the entire opera was taking place.
The background of the stage was a huge semitransparent screen, with the biggest video projection I have been part of so far - 9 x 9 meters. My role was to sit behind this screen, in darkness, in a self-designed set consisting of locked up animals (huge spiders in a glass box, a parakeet in a cage, grasshoppers under a net, ants under glass, etc) and different screening and filming devices which were capturing and mirroring my interaction with them, while those images were now and then being used live as a sort of counterpoint to the main projection of the opera background.
I used different forms of interaction with the image, a few of them being: placing a caleidoscope in front of a camera lens filming its own feedback on a TV screen; using a glass plate with a thin layer of milk on it, on which an image was being projected from beneath, and then letting grasshoppers crawl through the milk and recapturing this projection, again from beneath - this created a liquid screen where the grasshoppers made holes and shone through the image whenever they moved, holes which would slowly close again after they went further; letting ants walk over a TV screen through which their own image was being feedbacked to the camera, thus creating a huge army of increasingly deformed creatures.

performance history
10.12.02, Stadsschouwburg Rotterdam
12.12.02, Muziekcentrum Vredenburg, Utrecht