Mapping Sorrel Hays

United States of America / 60'
Concert / Pre-festival event

It is rather simple: writers, musicians, philosophers, poets and activists meet. Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein, Bella Abzug, Bella Akhmatova, Hildegard of Bingen, Rosalia de Castro, Jessamyn West, Annie Safely Houston and Jessamyn West. And a bee swarm. And a giraffe, of course – i.e., they are placed in space by the composer Sorrel Hays, who, in her modernist operas, opens their overlooked and overheard histories, amplifies them and guides them on a public stage, where they finally express themselves. In Sorrel Hays’ works, these women are no longer on the margins of society. Instead, they become the centre of the world, which is precisely them. The question of sexual and gender difference develops in a completely new direction. Furthermore, through contextualised art, the author questions the urgency of established, dominant structures, and then she re-shapes them, this is her humanist revolution, and today, when social movements are dying down, they are still in motion. Sorrel Hays sound creations persistently defy the unbearable realities of necrophilic hypercapitalism, and its accompanying patriarchal and heterocentristic structures. Again and again, partly with the use of satire, but mostly with pure sharpness, the author points to the possibility of a different reality, and, most importantly, a different future.

The arias from the operas Mapping Venus (1995/2014), The Glass Woman (1989/1993), Bella (2017), The Bee Opera (2003/2014) and Our Giraffe (2008) will be performed by the New York soloists Beth Griffith, Maeve Höglund, Heather Roberts, Bruce Rameker and Benjamin Lund, and on piano, Dmitri Glivinski.

Tickets: €10 / €8 

The concert is the concluding event of the Festival Topographies of Sound (ŠKUC), curated by Nina Dragičević.