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FULL Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch’s Accuser (Bielawa) Santa Ana CA 2016
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser
- Composer: Bielawa Lisa
- Libretto: Erik Ehn
- Venue & Opera Company: Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, California
- Recorded: 2016
- Type: Movie
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch’s Accuser is an opera that considers the nature and uses of female hysteria through time, as witch-hunters, early psychiatrists, and modern artists variously define the condition. Based on composer Bielawa’s own research at Yale as a Literature major, then freely adapted and re-imagined by librettist Ehn, Vireo is a composite history of the way in which teenage-girl visionaries’ writings and rantings have been manipulated, incorporated, and interpreted by the communities of men surrounding them throughout history, from the European Dark Ages, to Salem Massachusetts, 19th-century France, the Surrealists in Paris, and contemporary performance art. Featuring arias for dying cows, infatuated students, disembodied ageless women, and a mysterious twin of Vireo herself, the opera provides a thoughtful, and sometimes humorous look at the universal issues of gender identity, perception, and reality.