Carriageworks, Sydney
March 28, 2018

The lights dim agonisingly slowly, a gradual immersion into what will become sensory deprivation levels of darkness in Bay 20 of Sydney’s Carriageworks. From this blackness the sound of amplified breathing emerges, a deliberate, stylised respiration that in the flexing time of the void allows the audience to hear every nuance of the breath, the dry, shifting harmonics of the resonant mouth-cavity and the wet sound as the singer swallows. Subsonic effects periodically filter through the electronics. The audience is engulfed in this soundscape, as if listening from inside the singer’s throat or head. The opening sequence of Sydney Chamber Opera’s The Howling Girls plunges the audience into a liminal world that evolves so slowly the slightest sonic or visual shift reverberates with unexpected power.

Sydney Chamber Opera’s The Howling Girls. Photo © Zan Wimberely

A collaboration between composer and former Ensemble Offspring co-artistic director Damien Ricketson and director Adena Jacobs (who last worked with Sydney Chamber Opera on Exil), The Howling Girls takes as its jumping off point an anecdote from the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. In the...