We Three Queens
Los Angeles-based experimental voice ensemble ILK presents We Three Queens, a contemporary electro-acoustic opera about unapologetic fate. Vocalists Sara Sinclair Gomez, Micaela Tobin and Sharon Chohi Kim embody three historical sirens of ill repute: Mary Tudor, Elizabeth Bathory and Wu Zeitan. Using texts adapted from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, the performers reexamine the legacies of their characters through the three subjects of Stein's chapters: objects, food, and rooms. We Three Queens challenges figurations of women as things to be perceived, nourished, and enclosed. The opera combines musical elements of traditional English folk song, cabaret, trip hop, and noise, the physical language of burlesque and butoh, and the narrative structure of mythology. Its hybridization of genre seeks to reinterpret rituals of the profane and the divine as well as collapse the past, present and future into the theatrical space.
March 2, 2016
The Wild Beast, California Institute of the Arts