Blue Electric an Opera

Blue Electric based on Alba Arikha’s acclaimed memoir Major/Minor, is a collaboration between husband and wife, an opera of juxtapositions: contemporary orchestral music and bursts of pop, adolescent preoccupations and concentration camps. It is about a father and daughter and the effect – years later – of the Holocaust on their relationship, a subject which has rarely been addressed in operatic form. A teenage girl in 1980’s Paris attempts to lead a normal adolescent existence – falling in love, rebelling, searching for her identity – against the backdrop of her volatile artist father’s secret history of war, holocaust and exile. By day, Maya a seventeen-year old Parisian girl smokes in secret, wears blue electric eye shadow, dreams of boys and tries to fit in. By night, she wonders why her father screams in German and where his anger comes from. She fights him, and he fights her back. Slowly. as the gulf between them widens, the harrowing truth begins to emerge.

Blue Electric will be staged with a live orchestra of 11 and a chorus of eight singers. There will also be projections of war footage.