Artists: Nigel Kellaway (composer and co-devisor), Katia Molino, Michael Bell.
Supported by the Department of Performance Studies, University of Sydney, and the Bundanon Trust
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A new theatrical work built in tandem with a new musical composition for solo piano (built on Bach’s B minor Mass).
The opera Project makes theatre, and in this work seeks to reflect on questions about why we want to perform, where we come from and what we wish to share and communicate. Kellaway’s experience is in crafting theatrical texts and structures, and so commenced writing ARCADIA as a performative monologue and musical score, creating an enigma obliquely referencing the artistic luminaries he has encountered and who have influenced him over decades – glimmers of experience to be invented upon. This will be a process of weaving factual details of a life into a fantastical fiction, incorporating thinly disguised characters, and dwelling on the notional “locus amoenus” redolent in Homer, Ovid and Virgil.
This new work will feature Kellaway as an actor, but a distanced narrator rather than active protagonist. The writings of Norman Mailer (Castle in the Forest), Heiner Muller (Hamlet machine) and Thomas Mann (The Holy Sinner) and Louis Malle’s film My Dinner with Andre interest us here, in that they centre mostly on narrators that are already dead, and so can recklessly reflect on scorching memories of childhood,
betrayal, revelation and triumph from beyond the grave. Joining Kellaway on stage will be Katia Molino, as his mysterious interlocutor … with stories of her own.
We want to consider the “artist apart” – a witness to the histories of the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Romanticism, a 20th century of wars, Apartheid, the feminist and Gay movements … and then a leap into Post Dramaticism, testing the voices we have remotely explored over a shared 80 years as performance creators.