Output details

'Anna Nicole' opera in 2 acts

Anna Nicole sets out to transform musical drama and musical dramatic process through a radical confrontation between very different cultural syntaxes – from the world of high end ‘classical’ through to ‘pop’ and ‘easy listening’ to low end ‘trailer trash’.

The aim of the opera is to integrate these extremes to intensify dramatic process and to re-think sustained musical-dramatic narrative.

The intent is to empower both high and low drama, reaching across comedy and tragedy, enriching and intensifying each of them and creating a re-invigorated musical/dramatic narrative that can support the breadth, complexity and the ‘nowness’ of the subject.

The scale of these processes in this work is much more extended than I have attempted on previous occasions. This is a summative work in that for some years my output has concerned itself directly with the strategic relationship between ‘high’ art and ‘popular’ and ‘low’ culture. Anna Nicole is the most ambitious working of these concerns, drawing together as it does a range of cultural references and focussing on what this level of, apparently irreconcilable, diversity can achieve in dramatic, operatic and narrative terms.

Anna Nicole builds on my desire to collaborate with a range of partners, from writers and directors to singers and performers. The choice of the writer Richard Thomas to work on the text for Anna Nicole is exemplary. Thomas’ notoriety for his stage work Jerry Springer - The Opera might have provided an initial provocation (especially given that the work was a high profile Royal Opera House commission). But like myself, Thomas finds the lyrical in trash culture and delights in a (sometimes partially invented) language that provokes through obscenity and surprises in its range of cultural reference – abandoning convention in favour of something renewed and vigorous and transforming of stage narrative.