Admiring La Stupenda
Daniel Somerville
Choreographer: Daniel SomervillePlace: Praha, Venuše ve Švehlovce
Performance description
In Admiring La Stupenda* Daniel Somerville combines his Butoh informed movement practice with his love for opera and his queer identity. Adopting the persona of an ‘opera queen’ – a gay man with an obsessive passion for opera and one diva in particular – Somerville traces his relationship to ‘La Stupenda’ (the late Australian coloratura soprano Dame Joan Sutherland) and how an admiration for this particular diva intersects and fuses with memories of his mother, now housebound by debilitating anxiety and dementia.
*Admiring La Stupenda* is an homage to Kazuo Ohno’s landmark Butoh performance Admiring L’Argentina. Both are performances that merge a passion for, and memory of, a particular performer (a tango dancer for Ohno and an opera singer for Somerville) with memories of their mothers. What emerges is a tragi-camp performance played out through movement derived from a close study of the gestures of opera singers processed through the embodiment practices of Butoh. At times camp and funny, at times dark and hopeless, Somerville dresses in improvised opera gowns as we travel from a London bedsit, through remembered and imagined opera houses to a car park in Sydney.
*Admiring La Stupenda* at *Wilde festival is part of the project Butoh in Contemporary Performance, financed by the programme NPO no. 4/2022, Development of Competencies for CCS Workers: Projects of International Artistic and Professional Cooperation in the Czech Republic.