Phaedra
Happy Days Festival, Enniskillen
A site-specific, immersive event that was an acclaimed success at this international festival. The venue for this re-imagining of Benjamin Britten’s Cantata was an Olympic scale equestrian arena in the abandoned Necarne Castle in Northern Ireland.
The audience enters the vast darkened space of the arena to discover Phaedra, (mezzo soprano, Ruby Philogene) motionless aloft a towering structure, a kind of exoskeleton that is part dress part funeral pyre. The Ulster Orchestra are positioned around her. The audience gather in turn around the orchestra. The music begins and Phaedra, singing, slowly starts to turn. Little by little we become aware that her shape is changing as the dress itself (made of dissolvable fabric and woven through with horsehair) begins to physically disintegrate (hidden sources of mist/water coruscate through the dissolvable fabric.) As Phaedra articulates her tragedy, sculptural blades of light repeatedly slice into her form, the final segment of a life wracked by forbidden love. The audience bears witness to her agonisingly slow physical and emotional disintegration unravelling dramatically to an undefined end. As the dress dissolves the light shrinks, lingering momentarily on her eyes as the last source of life before she dies. Darkness and silence engulf her.

“As the audience surrounds Phaedra in the darkness, she rotates slowly, lamenting her plight. Layers of sound extend the Ulster Orchestra’s percussion.. while the white gown disintegrates in dripping water. All elements combine to create an image of frozen grief exquisitely realised”  – The Guardian

“Creative brilliance that make for a true festival event...glorious of voice and calm of purpose, Philogene articulates the fatal plight of Racine's tragic heroine” – The Stage
“Towering and moving.. The director is becoming increasingly acclaimed for her work in opera and classical music” – The Times