Truth or illusion, life or death... where are the boundaries when a person is plunged into madness? Inspired by Noh theatre, where all the roles, even the female ones, are performed by men, Benjamin Britten imagined Curlew River as the parable of a woman recounting her son's disappearance, her ‘madness’ gradually becoming the expression of an inner strength.
Silvia Costa imagined this piece as a diptych with Serbian composer Marko Nikodijević's world premiere as part of the opera creation laboratory, NOX (Nancy Opera Xperience). Substituting a female chorus for the male one, this work recounts the origins of the mysterious river: a woman digs into the earth with her hands and the tears she sheds give life to the river as a place to mourn her own fate.
The director, who also wrote the libretto, interweaves the two stories in a production inspired by the codes of Japanese theatre, where simplicity, abstraction and silence become powerful vectors of emotion.