MINOTAUR THE ISLAND Aurora Festival, NSW

"With the minimum of sources Young crafts a perpetuum of ever-changing interest and subtlety absolutely wedded to the opera’s woven and wooden stage design. As the first part of a trilogy, The Island sets a stunning precedent for the future works, and as Ariadne puts it at the beginning of The Island: “even if I were to die, I would return.” Matthew Lorenzon, Realtime read more

'I found the performance wholly absorbing, and started thinking about the Lares, the household gods of the Romans, where the domestic sphere is also the site of the sacred.'
Alison Croggon, TheatreNotes

"Minotaur is a place—the island of Minotaur. The music is tense—just out of reach—fracturing and breaking into bits—travelling through corridors. The objects are the island, and are moved around the space like flotsam from a shipwreck." Minotaur - The Island, or The Lost Opera Act I

Chamber Made Opera's

MINOTAUR THE ISLAND

Presented by the Aurora Festival of Living Music

Riverside Theatres
Cnr Church & Market Streets, Parramatta
9-11 May 2012
7.30pm

Book tickets here

Aurora Festival of Living Music
Riverside Theatres
Follow on Twitter: #MinotaurIsland

Composer: David Young
Writer/Director: Margaret Cameron
Performers: Deborah Kayser, Caroline Lee and Hellen Sky
Double Bass: Mark Cauvin
Percussion: Matthias Schack-Arnott
Harpsichord: Anastasia Russell-Head

Virtually all the music for Monteverdi’s 1608 opera L’Arianna, one of the most influential and famous examples of early Baroque opera, has been lost. Minotaur The Island is the first part of an exciting new chamber opera which re-imagines the lost opera of Monteverdi, focussing on the tragic story of the Minotaur.

Minotaur The Island turns around the figure of the Minotaur, the bastard child of peverse love. The work begins with the establishment of the mythic world, and an introduction to the poetics of the piece. Various characters, objects, sounds and theoretical constructs are introduced and developed. We see the conception of Pasiphae, King Minos’ mail order bride, who has become obsessed with the bull of heaven. She gives birth to the monstrous Minotaur, part bull, part human. The Minotaur grows and becomes ferocious, needing to devour men for sustenance, and as a consequence is locked away, in a gigantic labyrinth.

MINOTAUR - THE ISLAND was co-commissioned by Ten Days on the Island and Dr Peta Gillingham. Part of the New Music Network 2011 Series.

Photo © Daisy Noyes