MEDIATHEK

We were commissioned to write an opera for the Limerick City of Culture. We decided to see if we could find the oldest woman in the city and create a work about our investigation and also about the story of the oldest woman. We started slowly asking a local butcher who sent us to his grandmother who insisted she wasn't old at all, only 83, so she sent us to her sister and so on and soon. We met lots of people and they told us stories of their mothers and daughter and sister; we learnt Lithuianian proverbs and we saved a butterfly in a cafe and eventually we found Sister Anthony who was 104 years old and she told her her life story. About growing up in Ireland in the 1920s and about her 60 years spent in Italy as a nun. We took all research and we built a show. Some written before. Some in the rehearsal room. We cast 4 sopranos and a mezzo. They would be our narrators, hosts, actors and singers. They would work as an ensemble. We built a set out of our research: the interviews, the papers, the maps and books. We invited the people we had meet to join us on stage as part of a choir and we invited children on stage to draw pictures of the oldest women they knew. We brought all this material together and performed for the people of Limerick. Sister Anthony couldn't make it. She was too frail but lots of other people we had spoken to did. Sister Anthony passed away some weeks later but there is now a new oldest woman in Limerick and we plan to find her too next time we perform the show.