Dutch premiere
In this interactive opera Blank Slate by Irish composer Seán Doherty, the audience is assigned one of the leading roles. The other two leading actors, Dutch vocal coach/singer Merel Martens and Swedish singer Peder Karlsson, also act as conductors of the audience.
Merel Martens: “We do this by means of Vocal Painting. This is a language with which gestures are directly translated into sound. We spend the first fifteen minutes going through the gestures with the audience. Then we start the performance straight away, which offers plenty of room for improvisation. Every performance is different. With our hand gestures we control musical parameters such as melody, tempo and dynamics. There is only one condition to be able to participate: you have to be curious.”
‘Vocal painting’ is a technique, often associated with choral music, in which the conductor uses gestures to guide a choir in creating dynamic, spontaneous and improvised vocal expressions. This technique is a form of musical ‘painting’, using the human voice as the primary medium. It has been used extensively in an improvisatory context, but is now being used for the very first time in a dramatic context in the new opera ‘Blank Slate’.
The opera is about the ever-recurring challenges of life, everyone will recognize themselves in it. In terms of style, Blank Slate is somewhere between popular and classical. Vocal Painting was developed ten years ago by the Danish conservatory teacher Jim Daus Hjernøe.
This new opera genre is the result of an international collaboration between Irish composer Seán Doherty and vocal experts Merel Martens (Netherlands), Peder Karlsson (Sweden), Stephan Lutermann and Lars Scheibner (CHOREOS ensemble, Germany).
