Experience

SFIAF: "Mordake" and week two -- reviewed, previewed

Bay Area composer Erling Wold’s new solo chamber opera, starring acclaimed tenor John Duykers, is enjoying a thrillingly intimate world premiere this week under the banner of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Based on the deeply weird story of 19th-century scion and medical curiosity Edward Mordake (driven to suicide by the residual visage on the back of his head of his female "evil twin"), Mordake packs a multisensory punch inside a tightly knit, highly portable production—one clearly unwilling to sacrifice opera’s theatrical grandeur to avant-garde budgets.

Thanks, in part, to Mordake’s use of some contemporary video technology and an exquisite design concept, it doesn’t have to. Sets, properties, costumes and lights are all kept to a lean but choice minimum in a production that takes supreme advantage of a prerecorded electronic score as well as a striking interactive visual panorama featuring a video motion-sensing program designed by German engineer Frieder Weiss.

topics: bay area, dance, digital filmmaking, experimental film, opera