The Blue Woman

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BBC Radio 4 - The Blue Woman

How a new opera is addressing the psychological aftermath of sexual violence.

Composer Laura Bowler and director Katie Mitchell are staging a new opera which addresses the psychological aftermath of sexual violence towards women.

We follow composer Dr Laura Bowler, librettist Laura Lomas, and director Katie Mitchell as they prepare a radical new work on the theme of sexual violence, The Blue Woman, at the Royal Opera House.

The opera canon has a cruel history of sexual violence towards women - from Don Giovanni to the Rape of Lucretia. Either as part of the opera as written, or in contemporary stagings where it’s added in after the fact by the director. 

For musicologist Dr Margaret Cormier, sexual violence or the threat of sexual violence is omnipresent in the canon as a plot device, although often in a veiled way. Today the beauty of the music can sometimes be used to excuse more problematic elements of these historical works, but when rape or sexual assault is staged flippantly or uncritically, productions can perpetuate harmful rape myths or seem to condone the mysogeny of the composer’s era. But calling it out and drawing it to the surface is also fraught with risks.

New opera works by women, however, are addressing the theme of sexual violence very differently, with a focus on the survivor’s experience and the aftermath of trauma. Ellen Reid is an LA-based composer and sound artist who most recently created a public soundwalk in Regent’s Park for the Wellcome Trust. Her opera P R I S M won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2019. She describes her approach to a story about the impact of sexual assault through sound.   

Thumbprint is a 2014 chamber opera composed by Kamala Sankaram based on the story of Mukhtār Mā'ī. In 2002, Mukhtār was gang-raped in Pakistan by a local clan as a form of “honour revenge” but took her attackers to court, and is now a human rights activist. Kamala explains how they chose to portray but not to musicalise the attack.

Producer: Victoria Ferran
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