by María Pétursdóttir
Cyclic conditions- Tíðarfar
Project proposal
Cyclic conditions is an opera by María Pétursdóttir that consists of multimedia visual imagery, text and sound as well as choreographed theater.
The Icelandic word “tíðir” can mean “time” or a season or a weather condition and it can also mean to menstruate. People that menstruate go through cycles like the weather does through seasons and the focus of this work is to describe those metaphorical cycles through text, sound/music, and images, in performance for stage and video installations.
Cyclic conditions will be a collaboration project between the main writer/author, who has a background in visual arts and music, a director, musicians, choreographer, and other artists, designers, and technicians and is meant to have input into the creational process through the collective during the rehearsal process. The writer, director, composer, and choreographer will work together on the script at the beginning with input from biology and social science students or gender study students from the Icelandic University. The actors, dancers, and musicians will then join with costume and set designers and the assisting staff members. Technical staff members will get involved as timely as needed but in the last month and weeks before the premiere, the whole staff will be involved.
The work will include 6 actors, 3 dancers, and 3 musicians that will be performing the life work on a stage but the theater will also include video installations and electrical music. It will also include a choreographer to compose movements on stage, a composer for the soundscape and music, a director for the whole performance, both video setup and stage set, a costume designer as well as people like makeup artists and photographers for documentation. Marketing people will work with the producer and director.
The personnel will consist of 28 persons from artists, technicians to ticket sales staff, most of them Icelandic but some of them also from other Nordic and European countries.
The aim of this production is to set up a feast for the senses, but the themes will also combine philosophy, history, biology, and science, for example related to climate changes as well as social and political issues including gender studies through the art. A poetic interdisciplinary opera that will leave you with a new context surrounding the bleeding, the collective human pain, and the weather conditions in nature in the past, present, and future to come.
The work will be rehearsed for two months and premiered in a theater in Iceland on three premier nights. The premiers will be held at the end of September, so the working time frame is mostly August till September 2023.