Amor´s Ease, opera for babies
The audience is placed in the time of the Baroque period: Two persons play music and dance. One stumbles, trips, falls and experience an overwhelming pain! Her companion try to blow the pain away, but a song is what help her recover in the end. As soon as she is hale and hearty, the companion in her turn stumbles and falls. Luckily the first urge to relieve the pain. The music is composed by Eivind Buene, including fragments from the opera King Arthur by Henry Purcell. How caring for someone can make a significant difference, is the idea behind this comical opera.
Amor`s Ease, opera for babies is a co-production between Babyopera and the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet, and part of Ultima Contemporary Music Festival 2020
Team and performers
Idea, consept and scenario (libretto) Christina Lindgren
Music and text Eivind Buene after an aria from King Arthur by Henry Purcell and John Dryden
Direction Christina Lindgren
Choreography Elizabeth Svarstad
Set design Tormod Lindgren
Costume design Christina Lindgren
Dramaturgy Svante Aulis Löwenborg
Performers Elisabeth Holmertz, Silje Aker Johnsen
Costume and scenography made by the creaftsmen and – women at the workshops of The Norwegian Opera & Ballet
Producer Babyopera Camilla Svingen / Syv Mil
Producer The Norwegian Opera & Ballet Henrik Celius
Consultant Karstein Solli
Supported by Arts Council Norway
Premiere at the Norwegian Opera & Ballet September 10th 2020.
For more information, please visit: https://operaen.no/en/Productions/amors-ease-opera-for-babies/
– Both the baby’s sensory world and the opera’s uniqueness are taken seriously in Orpheus’ Comfort
– The well-thought-out mixture of absurd and concrete, known and unknown works on several levels and creates a cozy and strangely small universe with room for both adults and children.
From the review by Embret Rognerød, Periskop
The babies that I experienced the performance together with gasped in excitement and anticipation meeting the sounds and visual impressions.
– Especially the climax of the performance, where the two dancers falls in very slow motion, seemed to capture the young audience. The simple repetition of the fall and the coupling of heartfelt singing with something as prosaic as someone touching a band-aid and a bandage seemed to fascinate the babies deeply.
From the review by Sunniva Thomassen, Periskop
– The totality of the two performances seems more important than the individual elements, which also makes the operas so successful.
– The moves are well done and make the performance work on the children’s terms.
– Amor ś Ease and Orfeus ́ Comfort complements each other, and are strangely
uniform and different at the same time.
Full review by Hilde Halvorsrød
Review at www.scenekunst.no
By Hilde Halvorsrød
September 22nd 2020 http://www.scenekunst.no/sak/opera-som-ansiktsmimikk/
HEADLINE: Opera as a facial expression
The baby opera Orpheus’ Comfort plays with baroque conventions and takes babies seriously.
Two small “baby operas” are part of a co-production between the The Norwegian Opera & Ballet and Christina Lindgren’s company, which is called Babyopera. The composers Maja Ratkje and Eivind Buene have each written a 25-minute work inspired by their respective baroque operas, Orpheus’ Comfort, based on a fragment of an aria in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orphée ed Euridice, and Amor’s Ease, written over an aria by Henry Purcells King Arthur. The project was originally presented as part of former opera director Annilese Miskimmon’s investment in newly written opera, the VOeX festival, which barely managed to be completed once before Miskimmon disappeared across the canal. Because there were few tickets for all performances for infection control reasons, Scenekunst.no unfortunately only got a ticket to Orpheus’ Comfort.
Casting pearls to the piglets?
I can not help but think that the concept of “baby opera” arouses some thoughts in advance. Admittedly, the age group is from 0–3 years, but no lower limit is stated. Does this mean that the creators hope that parents themselves understand if their babies are big enough, or do they think that it can also be something for the very, very youngest? So we are talking here potentially about beings who are quite short-sighted, lack proper deep vision and who have such a poor memory that they become completely overwhelmed every time they discover their own toes. The risk of throwing pearls to (cute little) pigs must be said to be present. Another biased question that arises is how to make something with as low a threshold as this must necessarily have, and which at the same time with a certain right can be called opera and not as often “fairytale time” or “baby theater”.
Let me just reveal at once: it is possible. Orpheus’ Comfort succeeds both in completely shackling my four-month-old baby, at the same time as it introduces and teases unmistakable opera conventions. The show’s two only performers, Silje Aker Johnsen and Elisabeth Holmertz, meet us in the foyer of the opera house wearing identical costumes that are a fine-tuned mix of baby-friendly imagination and caricatured baroque opera: They have light powder perukes, white make-up and dresses with contemporary stiffened skirts that stand out from the hips. Babies’ interest in strong colors is used for what it is worth – the
dresses are bright yellow, the shoes and gloves are signal red, and deep green flower meadows grow along the skirt edges. Slightly older children can also enjoy a row of tiny cows around the dress waist. They make gestures and dance steps in the best stylized baroque manner, while each playing a simple melody on lyres. They do not sing in the traditional sense, but repeat short tones and single syllables in bright and baby-friendly style.
Facial conversations
Eventually, they lure us into a small stage room, consisting of scenic walls set up in a corner of the foyer, where we get to sit on pillows on the floor. That way, we get right into the action, and the characters get as close as the infection control allows. It facilitates to show the babies what they think is even more exciting than strong colors, namely human faces. Aker Johnsen and Holmertz play directly on the audience with smiles, eye contact and large and clear facial expressions. My co-reviewer stares with wide eyes and smiles back – this is a language she knows.
But she has not yet fully realized that things that disappear from her field of vision continue to exist, and therefore the play’s “great drama” probably passed her by: One character disappears several times out of the stage room, to the great disappointment of the other, but then there are strange and exciting sounds from the other side of the wall: bells ring, plastic crackles and the two characters sing to each other, before the missing one returns. I would think it’s spot on for slightly older babies who have just cracked that code, but it undoubtedly seemed that the visual and sonic impressions fascinated even without this context.
Subtle use of music
Music is perhaps the element used with the greatest care. It consists only of the simple sporadic strumming of the lyre and of the sparse fragmentary song of the two actors. Only in a few places do they sing a few longer sequences with full voice, which appears as the culmination that the fragments have built up to. If I were to point to something I missed, there might be some more extensive use of music, perhaps especially singing, but it is quite possible it is sufficient for the little ones.
In all cases, both the baby’s sensory world and the opera’s uniqueness are taken seriously in Orpheus’ Comfort, and are met in communication through living bodies and voices. The well-thought-out mixture of absurd and concrete, known and unknown works on several levels and creates a cozy and strangely small universe with room for both adults and children. The critic baby was neither hectically geared up nor comatose exhausted afterwards, and that is probably the best review she can give.
Excerpts from a review in web based magazine for review and discussions on visual and performative art for children, Periskop
From article report on the Ultima Contemporary Music Festival By Embret Rognerød.
Published 16th of September 2020 http://www.periskop.no/barnas-ultima-dag-ah-et-onsketre/
HEADLINE: Lots of ice and heat
The two actors in Amor ́s Ease, an opera for children aged 0-3 years, sing and dance like two synchronous baroque characters. Without a word, they can still reveal that they are friends.
The opera is written by Christina Lindgren, one of the creators of the baby opera Korall Koral (2009), an opera which has been performed both in Norway and abroad for a decade. In Amor ́s Ease, it is the contrasts between warm and cold, and between being close and being insecure that is emphasized. The scenery is in cool blue, a colour that is repeated in the costumes of the two dancers. The story is simple: two friends help each other out of their respective accidents through song.
With the help of the puppet-like choreography and the simple, rolling fragments of composer Eivind Buene, the performance touches on an impressive number of basic and crucial emotions. One gets the feeling that the babies capture the atmosphere in ways that adults may not be able to do ourselves. The babies that I experienced the performance together with gasped in excitement and anticipation meeting the sounds and visual impressions.
Songs like band-aid
/…/
Especially the climax of the performance, where the two dancers falls in very slow motion, seemed to capture the young audience. The simple repetition of the fall and the coupling of heartfelt singing with something as prosaic as someone touching a band-aid and a bandage seemed to fascinate the babies deeply.
In Amor’s Ease, the composer Eivind Buene has based his work on a fragment from Henry Purcell’s aria from King Arthur. A sly, small twist is added by making the passage with the two falls to the part of the performance where we hear comforting solo singing and classical verse lines during the 20-minute performance.