27 Mar 2015

Third meeting: Changing the world

Juho, Milla and Itzam talking about the death of art.

Our third meeting took place on a Friday morning, exactly like last time. We have a thing for mornings. Juho, Itzam and I dragged ourselves from the comfort of our (separate) beds to once again enjoy Milla's baking. Fortified with coffee and bread (straight from the oven, yum!) we went through two new scenes of the libretto. The first is a perfectly beautiful dialogue between a person and a dog, and the second includes the aria partly filmed in the previous post.
Having gone through the formalities of long-term planning, dreaming of performances to come, and talking about grants, next meetings and other necessary things, we then moved on to more interesting fields. Milla gave us a passionate speech about the death of art. There are many problems young artists have to face trying to carve themselves a place in this crowded, economically challenged, ungrateful world. Getting people to see your work is one huge issue. Theater and classical music are obviously not as interesting to the common folk as they were a few hundred years ago, and something needs to be done about that. A major problem is the way arts are (not) present in schools. Children should have the benefit of being exposed to art more and in ways that are accessible to them, so that they could form their own opinions about it after experiencing it first hand. Another thing is the preconceptions people have about opera, theater, contemporary music, etc. This is not only the audience's problem - also artists themselves tend to have pretty fixed ideas of what their work should be like, where it should be presented, and to whom.

One of the modest goals of our opera is to try to change the world in this respect. It might not be a huge change, maybe not even a middle-sized one, but we want to take this performance extravaganza-to-be to schools, cafes, and all sorts of places where music, theater, art and excitement should be more present.

Always somebody dies


Here's a short video of Milla reading the beginning of an aria-to-be. For those who don't recognize the language: she's speaking Finnish, saying "always somebody dies". This dramatic start gives a good idea of what the monologue is about - a solemn reflection on the big questions of life. Taking place in a deserted bar, it's the most profound moment of the existing 4 scenes of our libretto. It is very serious indeed.