The final instalment of events providing a snapshot into our process in creating Hold Your Breath. The audience were treated to new music, some integral audience-participation and one of Hugo’s phenomenal set peices - one of the octopus arms.
For the third time, a multi-year process together with the audience will culminate in a world premiere on the workshop stage. The opera studio of the Bregenz Festival and the Kunsthaus Bregenz will show the creative process - ideas, inspiration and exchange between the various artists. Before Hold Your Breath can be experienced for the first time in August 2024, another event will provide the path to this new musical theater work.
How the composer and violinist Éna Brennan changes our perception with live and electronic sounds throughout the room has already been experienced at several insight events and two concerts at the Kunsthaus Bregenz. For the participating singers and musicians, the composer also plans small islands for improvisation within the notated sounds. How this challenging idea can be put into practice will also be explored as part of the upcoming insight for the audience. In his works, the visual artist Hugo Canoilas often creates a special, even physical, closeness to the people viewing it. His huge painting with elements of an octopus, which he originally created for the Phantasmagoria exhibition in Coimbra, Portugal, was already on display in Bregenz in January 2023. The possibilities that the workshop stage offers to inspire the active perception of the audience, who are also moving, was a topic from the outset in the discussions with Éna Brennan and the director and librettist David Pountney. The former director of the Bregenz Festival has bundled all of his ideas into a moving story that brings to life sound, space and scenery. The fascinatingly intelligent creature, the octopus, also plays an important role here.
Photography © Bregenzer Festspiele / Anja Köhler