One island, countless lives

After last year's concert performance of the chamber opera Our Lady of the Rocks, the work Irene Popovic This year it was presented in its first stage form, under the new title Ostrvo, which gives a local story a universal meaning. In the Church of the Holy Spirit, on Sunday, July 20, along with the Boka Chamber Ensemble, the soprano Olivera Tičević, child's voice Sofia Ivanovic and an actress Dubravka Drakić.

Premiered last year in a concert version, the opera for three female voices, chamber ensemble and electronics attracted attention primarily for the theme it deals with. According to the libretto Jelena Novak, opera follows life Jacinta Kunić Mijović, a 19th-century embroiderer and painter from Perast who, waiting for her beloved sailor, embroiders a picture with threads of silk, gold, silver and her own hair. Jacinta appears in three stages of life - as a girl, a woman and an old woman - and three different voices build a multi-layered portrait that transforms personal destiny into a universal story of waiting, loss and hope. At the heart of this story is the motif of hair: a hair that Jacinta pulls out of herself and threads into a needle in order to continue embroidering with it. This almost painful gesture is one of the opera's key metaphors - an attempt to preserve the connection with an absent loved one. Hair is not only a sign of waiting, renunciation and female sacrifice, but a materialized memory, the last thread that connects what has been separated by the sea, time and fate.

The opera's stage setting remained faithful to the poetics of the music. The minimalist mise-en-scène, with the performers' reduced movement, emphasized the feeling of loneliness, while the video projection with sea motifs took on the role of scenography. However, its visual function remained mainly at the level of atmosphere, without a stronger narrative layer that would additionally open up space for the stage reflection of Jacinta's inner world. Almost the only prop on stage was - a several-meter-long tulle that took on multiple symbolic meanings - from the waves to Jacinta's hair. Its transparency established the boundary between the visible and the invisible, life and memory, reality and illusion.

Essentially, Ostrvo balances between contemporary opera and musical theatre, exploring postmodernist methods of composition, clearly moving away from the aesthetics of traditional opera. The composer uses three voices - operatic, naturalized and childish - synchronously and simultaneously in singing and speaking, shaping a layered portrait that expands from Jacinta's private experience to the universal experience of women through time, right up to the present day.

The opera began with an overture, when instrumentalists entered the stage through the auditorium and sang the opening bars, passing through the audience, opening up space and time for a series of associative images related to the plot of the opera: what Jacinta dreams about, what she calls from the past, what she hopes for. Along with the motifs of visions and hope, silence was an active element of dramaturgy, which is not equated with an interruption in the musical flow, but rather creates a space for respite, in which the previously expressed emotion is retained and echoed. Stylistically, the music is dominantly minimalist, with discreet or open influences of different musical codes and paradigms that the composer uses to shape sound images in the function of the plot. The author uses electronics to expand the sound space, and uses bells to emphasize waiting and transience. However, some directorial solutions left room for refinement. The costumes further burdened the gloomy atmosphere with their dark colors, instead of helping to distinguish the three periods of the main heroine's life. Static microphones limited the stage mobility of the performers and disturbed the naturalness of the mise-en-scène. Compared to last year's premiere, the changes refer to the division of roles. Natalia Radic she was replaced by dramatic soprano Olivera Tičević, whose darker voice emphasized the character of the adult Jacinta. The more substantial change, however, concerns the child's voice: instead of Doris Franovic Sofija Ivanović performed, whose vocal timbre is closer to that of an adult woman. This weakened the clear age differentiation of the three Jacintas. And since the difference was not further emphasized by either costume or stage characterization, the dramaturgical idea of ​​the three stages of life lost some of its clarity. The upcoming continuation of Ostrvo's life on the stage of the City Theater in Podgorica therefore represents a valuable opportunity to further round out this multi-layered work on stage and confirm it as an important contribution to contemporary musical theater.