Twice Through the Heart

The OpenEnded Group created a 3D stage environment for a live chamber opera, Twice Through the Heart. Originally composed in 1997 by English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and sung by mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, the staging was newly directed by Wayne MacGregor. The English-language libretto by poet Jackie Kay depicts the misery of a working-class English housewife imprisoned for killing her abusive husband. The OpenEnded Group worked in residence to create floating imagery (viewed through 3D glasses) suggestive of the protagonist’s mental state: the suffocating fear and violence she endured for years in a cramped council flat, along with brief mirages of the happy life she had once hoped for. To create the imagery, The OpenEnded Group traveled to Dartington in the UK to photographically capture a council housing flat from the 1970s.