“The end of December, how come?” she sings, adding: “As granny liked to say: The end of the world!” It shouldn’t have been possible.” In the opera, this walk is transmuted into the song of a woman who, after moaning about the dogshit in the sand and the vulgar people around her, recalls finding chanterelle mushrooms on a walk just as Grainytė had. Sun & Sea was inspired by many things but most poignantly of all by an epiphany Grainytė had during a walk in the Lithuanian woods. “And we’ll visit the remaining ones this year!” she sings in ludicrous hubris.
She sings about how her little boy is eight and a half and already has swum in the Red, White, Black, Aegean and Mediterranean Seas and already visited two of the world’s oceans. His wife, on the next sun lounger, undercuts this, singing as if holidays themselves are laborious, and travel a checklist of meaningless experiences. And I’ll become a loser in my own eyes.”Īnd then the singalong chorus: “Exhaustion, exhaustion, exhaustion, exhaustion …” His holiday, then, is a welcome temporary death, a sabbath from the 24/7 of work. “Because my colleagues will look down on me. “I really don’t feel that I can let myself slow down,” he sings. I found myself empathising with even the most unappealing of the characters, a wealthy workaholic businessman. That generous vision is what made Sun & Sea cut through my fears. Who are we to look down our noses at people who have 10 days holiday in the sun from jobs they hate?” “We aren’t looking down on people in that sense,” counters Lapelytė. The last thing I want to feel like is a smug operagoer looking down his proverbial lorgnette at broiling Eurotrash below. We wanted to create a dehumanised angle, to look at ourselves as if we are another species Vaiva Grainytėīut I was queasy at the idea of looking down on the performers as if they were sun seekers in a simulacrum of Torremolinos or Faliraki. “The audience promenades along the gantries to get different perspectives on the action,” adds Barzdžiukaitė. “We wanted to create a dehumanised angle, to look at ourselves as if we are another species,” Grainytė says. The trio had been struck by a performance of a work at New York’s Guggenheim Museum where audiences lined the ramps and surveyed the scene below. In Chanson of Admiration, for instance, a woman finds submarine beauty amid trash: “emerald-coloured bags, bottles and red bottle-caps – the sea never had so much colour!” The creators are not quite being ironic, just perversely focusing on the upside of environmental apocalypse.ĭirector Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė says that the fundamental idea for Sun & Sea was that the audience would look down on the action. The libretto goes so far as to allow the holidaymakers to take perverse pleasure in rubbish-choked oceans. Nobody likes being preached to.” Instead, she and her collaborators approach their heavy theme with a light touch. “We made a rule to avoid certain words like ‘plastic’ in the libretto, because we did not want to be overtly didactic. But we did want to think about the paradoxes of how we live.
Nor to judge people who are on their holidays. We never wanted to write a climate change opera. I can’t think of more dismal words than “climate change opera”. Photograph: Andrej VasilenkoĪfter the Rotterdam performance I tell the three women behind Sun & Sea that I had been dreading the show. Nobody likes being preached to’ … from left, Lina Lapelytė, Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė.