Into The Shimmer Heat promises to be the year's most adventurous operatic-theatre-dance outing, says ABC 720's cultural correspondent Victoria Laurie.
It's odd to think of an operatic work based around the story of a girl who is mute, but then Into the Shimmer Heat is no ordinary chamber opera.
And before anyone runs away fro the word 'opera', this is an anti-elitist show that defies categorisation. It invites audiences to go on an adventure with a team of highly experienced creative minds to experience "a hot air balloon disaster, a violent storm, vast emptiness, an oasis teaming with life, and a comical camel."
Into the Shimmer Heat has its world premiere in Perth on Saturday 8th October and runs until 15th October. It's been a long time in the making; it began life in 1995 as an experiment between the contemporary music group, Nova Ensemble, and Spare Parts Puppet Theatre to create an opera for young people about youth suicide.
But it soon evolved into a sophisticated work for adults and adolescents, says writer-director Phil Thomson. "The story is about grief and damage and the importance of living on," he says, explaining that the mute girl has survived a balloon accident in which her mother dies. "She meets all kinds of spirit world figures who convince her that it's time to return to the world and resume her life."
"We agonised for ages over whether we would even call the show an opera," says David Pye, Nova Ensemble's musical director, who composed the music with colleague Lee Buddle. "For a long time we were thinking of it as a piece of theatre, with dance and puppetry and sound design. But we came around to 'opera' because it's an all-encompassing word and traditionally opera was used for all the cutting edge art forms of the day."
At a time when pre-20th century operatic 'museum pieces' are still the main opera fare around Australia, Shimmer Heat was clearly too cutting edge. The WA Opera declared no interest in staging it, so it st on the shelf for years. But with a supernova of WA talent involved - among them opera singers Sara Macliver, Fiona Campbell and Robert Hofmann, and internationally renowned puppeteers Joanne Foley and Ian Tregonning - the Department of Culture and the Arts and UWA willingly came on board with nearly $400,000 in funding.
Says Pye, "traditional opera goers will love the gorgeous singing of Sara and Fiona on stage, while others will like the contemporary dance aspect, or the puppetry because that plays a big part in the opera."
The musical score stretches from 21st century music through to Goth Metal but, he adds, it generally aims to be melodic and accessible. "We were very much of the view that we weren't writing for an ivory tower audience but for the general public to come along and enjoy. And the story is interesting but not overly complex."
WAAPA dance graduate Sofie Burgoyne plays the role of a lonely teenage girl who is in a balloon accident that her mother doesn't survive. "She is mute and can only express herself through her movements and the music she listens to," says Pye. "The opera is about the hallucinations of the girl as she listens to one song in particular."
That particular song was composed by a new WA musical talent, Anthony Cormican; according to Pye, "he happens to be a fantastic solo guitar artist and recording engineer whose band has just signed to Atlantic Records in the States." He wrote a song called 'Feel', "and we've been able to extract threads of it that permeate the whole opera."
"It was always Lee's and my intention that we should incorporate the music of today, just as traditional operas did. So we wanted a kind of 'Vampire teen soft porn rock heavy metal genre'," Pye says teasingly. "But we basically don't move in those circles, so Anthony - who then asked to perform in the show - became our own personal Rock God!"
"Our puppeteers are doing some wonderful stuff too, creating the illusion of objects floating towards you. Much of the opera is set in the spirit world, so we have free rein to play with elements of magic."
Pye says Nova Ensemble has long been wanting to create larger scale events with bigger impact, "so that our work is taken notice of more widely. We're working on the idea of streaming the last performance of Into the Shimmer Heat on the internet, it's just a matter of working out how people might pay for it! Any time Nova plays, usually in small concerts, the public says 'wow, you're great, so why haven't we heard of you?"
Into the Shimmer Heat - Nova Ensemble with Sara Macliver, Fiona Campbell, Robert Hofmann, Brendan Hanson and Sofie Burgoyne
