Darwin: The Opera

This looks orders of magnitude better than Jesus Christ: Super-star! And is probably the best performance that I'll never see.

Tomorrow, in a year is "a Darwin electro-opera" with music from none-other than The Knife, who give me goosebumps just by thinking about them. They teamed up with Danish performance group Hotel pro Forma. From the web-site:

Description
The world seen through the eyes of Charles Darwin forms the basis for the performance Tomorrow, in a year. Theatre production company Hotel Pro Forma’s striking visuals blend with pop-duo The Knife’s ground-breaking music to create a new species of electro-opera.

An opera singer, a pop singer and an actor perform The Knife’s music and represent Darwin, time and nature on stage. Six dancers form the raw material of life. Together with the newest technology in light and sound, our image of the world as a place of incredible variation, similarity and unity is re-discovered.

Concept
The opera-genre provides the DNA, the framework of the performance. It calls for large scale, and it forms a space where form and expression dominate. The Swedish music group The Knife creates completely new compositions that challenge the conventional conception of opera music. The musical form is experimental and exploratory, and much of the sound heard was recorded while in the Amazon Jungle and in Iceland.

It is written for three singers of different backgrounds: popular music, classical opera and the performing arts. They are the narrators and the main characters in the performance. The singers tell about Darwin and they observe time and nature as Darwin.

Directed by Ralf Richardt Strøbech and Kirsten Dehlholm, the visual and conceptual universe is formed by Darwin’s thoughts, experiences and letters. The performance is divided into two parts – analogous to the development and publications of The Origin of Species.

The first part of the performance is exploratory. It concentrates on observing the underlying sequences and relationships between image, narrative, movement and music used in the performance. The second part is a synthesis of the material. A completed image and totality emerge, before the performance again mutates and passes into new forms, as happens over time with all things.

The opera presents an image of Darwin that above all reminds us that the world is a place of remarkable similarities and amazing diversity. That over time - tomorrow, in a year, or tomorrow, in a million years - change is inevitable.

AMAZING! This is art and science how she was meant to be spoke! You can also download all the lyrics on the opera's homepage. The title piece is particularly nice:

TOMORROW, IN A YEAR
An intersection of the plain
by the bank of some great stream

the animal carcasses
and skeletons would be
entombed

Tomorrow in a year
tomorrow in a million years

Ages resting in
the rings of a tree.
Fossils in lay in slate
marking the old forest’s edge

I’ve stood on a mountain
dividing three regions.
Then it was just a pebble
that I held inside my hand

In between each flap
of a butterfly’s wings,
countless changes
that have gone on unnoticed

A cricket rubs it’s forewings
together and I am forced
to think of the time that it’s taken
to build

Mountains fossils

Larva lava

The only downside is that this is a very difficult performance to see. Must like The Knive themselves, there are only scattered showing across Europe, and probably nothing overseas.