MEDIATHEK

The Howling Girls is an experimental wordless opera exploring the medium and metaphor of the voice.
 
 Created by director Adena Jacobs and composer Damien Ricketson, the work is inspired by an anecdote that emerged in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks in which five teenage girls presented separately to hospitals unable to swallow believing some debris or body-parts from the destruction had lodged in their throats. The doctor who examined them found no physical obstruction.
 
 The haunting image has been read as a collective expression of trauma and hysteria. Jacobs and Ricketson’s non-verbal creative response, featuring soprano Jane Sheldon and a troupe of teenage performers, critiques the dominant patriarchal depiction of female hysteria – a history of not being believed and of speaking a language deemed irrational and unintelligible – and recasts it as a subversive mode of communication with the power to disrupt and undermine familiar systems.
 
 The throbbing chorus of young voices, together with an immersive orchestration of theremin, keyboards and electroacoustic music, attempts to communicate in a protolanguage beyond the rational: a landscape of sensations that bypass the brain and work directly on the body and reconstitute the voice anew.