Terry Wey

Heart Chamber focuses on the elements of falling in love that expose us to our most intense beauty but also to our most intense vulnerabilities and insecurities. It is a grand opera of the smallest physical and psychic changes that push two strangers towards or away from each other as they embark on a transformative path, the conclusion of which one cannot envision. Two naked souls wrapped in their existential loneliness like a second skin have a chance of a true connection which might outweigh the internal isolation. This chance is equally euphoric and dangerous: so much is at stake. While society frames love as the true course to fulfillment, a love connection can have many unexpected consequences. Some live and die surrounded by their families. However, the Russian woman whose husband took her to the forest and cut her arms off in 2018 surely did not envision this at the beginning of their relationship.

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In the trenches, soldiers are locked in endless fighting: they move some kilometres forward only to return back to their former position in a deadly cycle. Elsewhere, a woman returns to a house she has once known and finds it now poised at the edge of an abyss. Wanting to leave, she encounters inexplicable obstacles. Chaya Czernowin’s harrowingly sublime work Infinite Now interweaves two seemingly unconnected storylines - Luk Perceval’s play FRONT based on Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All quiet on the Western front and Can Xue’s novella Homecoming - that both speak to the human condition of entrapment and existential nakedness, and beyond that to a will to survive.

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On his military campaign abroad, an eccentric king is more concerned with conquering women than land. He always gets his way, until one day he falls for his brother’s secret lover. Xerxes’ tactics, which he changes as often as his opulent costumes, allow his opponents little time to rest. This results in a ‘baroque Muppet Show,’ as the celebrated Norwegian director Stefan Herheim describes his spectacular stage production. After a bewildering series of games of love and intrigue, Handel’s opera ends with the insight that life is a theatre in which one cannot always choose one’s own role.

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Live performance by Les Arts Florissants at the Théâtre de Caen, recorded on 18 Octorber 2011. "One of the earliest operas deserving of the name, Didone is our first surviving musical version of the famous episode in Virgil's Aeneid where the Trojan Hero loves and then cruelly leaves the noble Dido." — from the DVD back cover

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