OPERA – MUSICAL THEATRE
Dimitra Trypani’s work, Edward’s Dream records in sounds the ‘mental maelstrom’ of someone who relives scenes from the day at night, where he has been intensely pressurized but does not react. Fragments of images, thoughts, feelings and visions coalesce in that sensitive twilight zone between sleeping and waking.
This is loosely based on Edward Hyde, the hero of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, while also drawing on contextual material from other sources, such as the I-Ching, etc.
Edward’s Dream is written for a piano quintet in five parts, interspersed with a discourse with a quintet of vocal ‘soundscapes’ which comprises voices, harps and Tibetan percussion instruments. Subtle lighting provides the performance with the sense of a slowly moving picture.
Concept – Musical composition – Text treatments: Dimitra Trypani
Piano Quintet:
Apollon Grammatikopoulos, Panagiotis Tziotis violin
Angela Giannaki viola
Dimitris Travlos cello
Nikos Kyriosoglou piano
Vocal ‘soundscapes’:
Gogo Xagara harp, vocals, percussion
Katerina Michopoulou vocals, percussion
Ismini Papathanasiou vocals, percussion
Dimitra Papastavrou vocals, percussion
Dimitra Trypani vocals, percussion
Miranda Kaldi recitation
Lighting Designer: Giorgos Nikopoulous
Sound Designer: Filippos Theocharakis
In this collage of vocal ‘soundscapes’ we hear fragments from texts by Alexandros Schinas, Fay Lychnou, Benjamin Peret, Gottfried Benn, Roland Barthes, James Joyce, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcello D’ Orta, Maria Paschalidou, Anonymous (‘Narration of Four-legged Animals’).
The poem heard at the beginning of the show is William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence.
