Opera in four acts (2015)

Libretto by Saburo Teshigawara, based on the eponymous novel by Stanislas Lem
Film material extracted Solaris Andrej Tarkovsky courtesy of Mosfilm

World premiere on 24 and 26 March 2015 at 20:00 and March 28, 2015 at 18:00 at the Opéra de Lille.

Erik Nielsen  direction
Saburo Teshigawara staging, choreography, sets, costumes, lights
Ulf Langheinrich 3D collaborative design and lights
IRCAM Computer Music Gilbert Nouno
Sarah Tynan Hari
Leigh Melrose Kris Kelvin
Tom Randle Snaut
Callum Thorpe Gibarian
Marcus Farnsworth Kelvin
Saburo Teshigawara, Rihoko Sato, Václav Kuneš dancers
with the participation of Nicolas Le Riche
Ensemble intercontemporain

Description

Originally, Solaris (“sunny” in Latin) is the most famous novel by Stanislaw Lem, the Polish master of science fiction literature. Written in 1961 and quickly became “cult” around the world, the book has been beautifully brought to the big screen by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and more recently by the American Steven Soderbergh. The novel imagines the existence of Solaris, a planet whose surface is completely covered by an ocean, a vastness that has an advanced form of extraterrestrial intelligence. Beyond the simple scientific or technological adventure, the novelist explores through this philosophical reflection mirrored on human behavior. Since ancient “know thyself and you will know the gods and the universe” Socrates, this theme has fascinated man. Stanislaw Lem’s novel probe our deepest fears and our hopes for the future: to understand an alien form, humans must learn to know themselves.

It was around this eternal human quest to find the composer Dai Fujikura and choreographer Saburo Teshigawara and set designer to create an operatic duet version of Solaris. A prolific composer as well as symphonic and chamber, Fujikura, born in 1977 in Japan but educated in England, is an early notice of the circle of Pierre Boulez (it runs in 2005 the creation of one of its parts). His countryman and elder, Saburo Teshigawara, has meanwhile already met many successes in France through his ballets presented at Chaillot and the Paris Opera or his staging of Acis and Galatea Handel created Aix Festival in summer 2011. On the narrative invented by Lem there are more than half a century, with musical and theatrical means the most “modern”, the collaboration of these two great creators should have the colors of the universally human and resolutely contemporary.