QUEENS
BY CRISTIANO MELLI
QUEENS (working title) is a cycle comprising three works for live performance and online “spin-offs”. The main concept behind the work is sincerity: the situations depicted relate intimately to the lives of the artistic team, in correspondence with our gender and affective expressions, bringing gender and LGBTQIA+ issues to the front stage in New Music. Besides continuing my research on multimediatic and interdisciplinary aspects of scenic music, this project also will try a different way of creating visibility, by using an “online layer” made of snaps to be uploaded in social media. This online layer is both part of the artistic result and advertisement for the live performances, using visual rhymes (such as lightning, costumes, make-up and/or stage props), as well as melodic fragments, to connect the cycle as one single Gestalt.
- HELLCOME: for Augusto SIlva (also known as the Drag Queen Belial) and Elisabeth Lusche (Trumpetress). This work has a satanic Drag Queen and a delicately strong female trumpet player “welcoming” homophobic speaches to a dungeon where these hate voices (a multichannel electronic composition called “Choir of Stupidity” in the score) are stopped, chattered, walled, stripped to its core hipocrisy. The online layer consists of short video snaps of Belial and the Trumpetress, above portions of the “Choir of Stupidity”, to be published in social media (like Instagram) as advertisement in the weeks prior to the opening of the Installation (which is the live performance of HELLCOME). In a square room, lit and decorated as the “Hell’s brothel”, several TV sets show anti-LGBTQIA+ and sexist videos gathered from many countries, while images from Belial and the Trumpetress are projected on fabrics hanging from the ceiling as an immersive labyrinth. Musically, the multichannel “Choir of Stupidity” plays in loop, occasionally stopped by unseen (electronic) trumpets. This work is already in development, having in mind the equipment and space available at Studio LOOS.
- THE BODY I HAVE: for Holden Madagame (tenor), a transgender man currently living in Germany. Besides having a beautiful voice and amazing stage presence, Holden has a series of videos of his transition to his present male body. The online layer of this work consists of reworking these videos plus an electronic music composed from recordings of his own voice from before transitioning until today, arranged as a single video performance. This video is uploaded online as a manner of discussing how cis-normative society sees (and often fetishizes) the trans body. The live performance is a song cycle for tenor, piano and electronics (optional, to increase the possibility of further performances of the songs), using as texts transphobic comments on online news (maybe even comments posted on his own videos), and with snaps of Holden’s transitioning videos as bridges between the songs.
- GESAMTKUNSTWERK: for Emma Rothman (soprano). The online layer of this work consists of a series of recordings of only the piano reduction of classical arias for male voice. These arias are chosen based on the toxic masculinity depicted by its lyrics and/or plot of the opera from which it comes. They are then uploaded on Youtube as “karaoke” versions (a trend on the streaming platform, being used by amateur and semi-professional singers to practice at home). Visually, the video starts with the piano but slowly changes to a close-up of Emma’s face interpreting how a woman would hear these words. The live performance is a pocket opera in which Emma faces and fights and feels these arias, nostalgic of their beauty against the background of a time when she wouldn’t be heard due to her gender. The accompaniment mixes a live piano against an electronic layer consisting of her own recordings (without piano), every tortured and misunderstood opera heroine incorporated in Emma’s performance.
