About the work
A woman finds herself on the verge of death when a seemingly endless cascade of questions comes pouring out of her, all directed toward a beloved, coveted and absent Other. With these are memories of a life well lived, of the longing for love and sex, of the faltering of her yearning and the tragedy of death behind it. The woman breaks down into four different facets of her own personality, each depicted by a different performer, representing the various perspectives and viewpoints of one individual. What forms is a web of interconnections between seeing and being seen, touching and being touched, feeling and being felt, understanding and being understood. It is a sensual play about sex, the body, love and death – with a surprising ending. LASH is the first opera by celebrated German-British composer Rebecca Saunders. With it, she is creating a work about the base, existential experiences of the human body that we spend our lives in and with which we experience and comprehend the world around us. 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.