About the work
A woman is suspended in the in the immediate aftermath of a death. She recounts fantasies and memories of love and loss and fucking and sickness, kissing, eyeballs, genitals, fingertips, lips and lashes – each scoured for consoling significance to hold back death’s meaninglessness. Through the imminence of her own body, her own mortality, she rediscovers loss as the precondition of experience – of love.

LASH is the first opera by celebrated German-British composer Rebecca Saunders. The work is based on the strikingly pictorial texts of video artist and writer Ed Atkins.

About the production
LASH will be staged by the Irish directing collective Dead Centre with the two directors Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel, the set and costume designer Nina Wetzel and the video artist Sebastian Dupouey. Dead Centre already staged the world premiere of Giorgio Battistelli's IL TEOREMA DI PASSOLINI here in 2023. With LASH, they are now going one step further towards an opera aesthetic that moves in a field of tension between concrete narration and the creation of rather abstract spaces of perception and experience and the worlds of hearing, seeing and feeling created therein. LASH will therefore feature large-format dream images on the verge of abstraction as well as concrete snapshots of the protagonist's life, which has disintegrated into fragments. There will be a microscopic view of the smallest body details such as eyelashes, skin flakes or hair, enlarged to stage-filling format, but also a gradually piecing together puzzle of a life with its desires and the question of the extent to which these have been fulfilled, with concrete encounters, hopes and disappointments.