We can say how Light and Water have loved each other, and from their desire a tree was born.
Like flesh
After marrying a lumberjack, a woman follows him into the forest, forgetting herself in a monotonous life devoid of desire, witnessing every day the sinister spectacle of nature's destruction. An encounter with a young female student who falls in love with her will rekindle her flame and change her life: her body will take root until it becomes a tree. Based on a libretto by the British playwright Cordelia Lynn, inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, Like flesh addresses the issue of the ecological crisis through the conflicting relationship between human beings and nature. Israeli composer Sivan Eldar lends this manifestation of nature a choral voice. With the complicity of Maxime Pascal at the head of the Opéra national de Lorraine Orchestra, she plants some sixty loudspeakers in the auditorium, scattered under the seats, as an invitation to the audience to lose itself in this forest of sound.
Like flesh marks the advent of a new generation of artists - librettists, composers, directors, conductors, etc. - who are using opera to express a sensitive, keen and uncompromising view of our world. But this chamber opera chooses to convey this message to future generations via the senses, offering us an unprecedented sensory experience: thanks to IRCAM's technology and Augustin Muller's computer creation, Like flesh's immersive music plunges us into a fluid world, where the borders that usually separate beings are erased.
After directing an incandescent Julie by Philippe Boesmans, Silvia Costa returns to the Opéra national de Lorraine. Director, performer and visual artist, she transforms this contemporary fable into a performance that is in perpetual change thanks to Francesco D'Abbraccio's videos: like the water of a river that we seek to retain in our hands but which always escapes us.
The Like flesh project won the prestigious FEDORA prize. In an operatic landscape often drawn to the repertoire of the past, its world premiere at the Opéra de Lille in 2022 was hailed by the press as an important event, demonstrating the vitality of the operatic genre and its ability to take on a major social issue such as the Anthropocene. This revival at the Opéra national de Lorraine coincides with the creation of Rendez-vous près du feu by Mathieu Corajod and the installation of the Ephemeral Garden on the Place Stanislas, thus creating a moment conducive to reflection on the place of the human being in the world.
