Past Production Reviews
8Forest Collective, a group that experiments with a range of performance types, has given us their world premiere of new work Labyrinth for Midsumma festival 2024. The work is filled with haunting, beautiful music and a collection of scenes that are mystical.
Into The Store you enter at Abbotsford Convent – a series of subfloor rooms beneath the site’s main gothic edifice – for Forest Collective’s latest new work, Labyrinth, another impressive work as part of Melbourne’s Midsumma Festival.
The Sea is a deeply evocative performance with melodic and dramatic music that sweeps over the audience. The staging of this performance immerses the audience in the music and the vocals in interesting and dynamic ways. This is an opera that directly addresses difficult themes and explores notions of coercion, corruption, and seduction. This is conveyed by a range of melodies that begin gently but build to more intense tones and sounds. The interesting and engaging use of costuming and stylised movement emphasise ideas such as abuse of power inherent in the libretto.
The Sea is an opera in five parts in an exciting new collaboration between Forest Collective and BK Opera. The two arts companies have put together a riveting production that looks at love and the abuse of love through patriarchy, trauma and the imbalance of power.
This is the first time that the Midsumma Festival has offered me a review ticket in its 20 year history. Admittedly, previous programs have given little room to serious music, the organizers being usually content to present bands and solo artists of limited ability or musicianship. All the more remarkable, then, that this ambitious project got off the ground under the Festival’s umbrella, and that its character impressed both for its compressed clarity of content and for a happy avoidance of obtuseness.
New Australian operas are few and far between. They’re expensive to mount and hard to sell seats to. Regulars complain about the umpteenth time La Boheme comes around, yet most aren’t interested in the great unknown. But without a work like Evan Lawson’s Orpheus, opera audiences would do nothing but sit in plush theatres and watch reruns of the past 300 years. It’s not for everyone, but it’s certainly important.
