I furiosi
Presented in Uferstudios Studio 1, 1-3 September 2023.
Soprano: Katherine Manley
Mezzo-Soprano: Anna Huntley
Tenor: Ferdinand Keller
Cembalo: Gerd Amelung
Violin / Recorder: Miako Klein
Cello: Stefano Cucuzzella
Glen Sheppard, Concept / Direction / Room / Video editing
Derya Issever and Michael Sontag, Styling
Fritz Polzer, Visual ethnography
I FURIOSI was an investigation into anger, grievance and political conformity, but also into how canonical material might function as a dramaturgical instrument for bringing contemporary experience into relation with inherited emotional forms.
The starting point was a Guardian article describing a young man's movement towards alt-right politics, which led to a wider investigation of how individual grievance is produced and intensified through wealth disparity, social dislocation and digitally mediated communication. Pankaj Mishra's book Age of Anger and Nietzsche's writing on the “unfinished problem of civilisation” provided further provocations for considering resentment not simply as individual pathology, but as a symptom of the social order that produces it.
Rather than representing contemporary political extremism directly, I used the secondary characters of three Handel operas – ORLANDO, ARIODONTE and ALCINA, all derived from Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso – as avatars through which contemporary experiences of exclusion, desire, humiliation and grievance could be brought into relation with the heightened emotional language of opera.
The canon therefore became more than an object of adaptation or quotation: it functioned as a meta-narrative dramaturgical structure, a pre-existing emotional and cultural architecture through which contemporary material could be reframed without being directly illustrated. Documentary statements and experiences were placed against the emotional situations expressed by the operatic characters, allowing connections and disjunctions to emerge.
The performance deliberately avoided conventional dramatic action and the establishment of a fourth wall, operating instead closer to the conditions of a recital. Singers and musicians remained visibly present as themselves while simultaneously giving voice to characters from the canon. This created overlapping levels of identification between the fictional characters, the documentary subjects and the performers themselves. A singer's own experience might resonate with that of a character; a documentary statement might acquire another register when heard against an aria; the audience, sharing the performers' and subjects' generational and cultural field, might recognise something of itself in both.
The resulting dramaturgy depended on subtle emotional resonance rather than represented events. Drama emerged through people in a room listening, feeling, recognising and making connections between different times and experiences. The canon became a shared cultural memory through which those relationships could be made perceptible.
Against the fear and conformity underlying contemporary grievance, the work also explored sensual experience and pleasure as potentially oppositional forces: whether music, bodies, voices and collective attention might produce a different kind of social relation.
I FURIOSI therefore investigated how inherited cultural forms can generate new dramaturgies – not by reproducing their original narratives, but by creating resonances between different people, different times and different levels of experience. Its dramatic action took place less in what the performers did than in what the audience perceived happening between them.
