TÊTE À TÊTE presents the premiere of PUSH!

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UK's hippest opera company comes to the Riverside Studios

PUSH! invites audiences to take a deep breath, grab the gas and air and let go on a roller coaster journey through one of the most extreme, yet most commonplace dramas that a human being can experience.

Safe in the hands of the country’s leading experimental opera company, PUSH! has all of Tête à Tête’s ingenious approach to the genre that has continuously thrilled audiences and critics alike.

PUSH! is the company’s first full length opera using just one composer and one librettist (Family Matters used six composers and one librettist) which, through a series of sketch-like episodes, enters the minds of six very different women at the precise moment they give birth. An operatic experience unlike any other, PUSH! runs the gamut of human emotion in an evening of high comedy and moving tragedy that climaxes with a celebration of the pure power and life force bound up in every labouring mother.

PUSH! was nurtured by Aldeburgh Productions as part of the Second Genesis Opera Project. Out of a field of two hundred international applications, three were finally commissioned in the spring of 2004 and only two, PUSH! being one, will actually be produced for touring. The idea for PUSH! grew out of Anna Reynold’s play Goodbye Stranger, a series of one night stands; PUSH! could almost be seen as the end product. PUSH! expresses Anna’s interest in summing up the comedy and sometimes tragedy of giving birth and the fact that David Bruce’s wife gave birth herself in 2002 made the collaboration between composer and librettist particularly fruitful.

PUSH! continues the strong Tête à Tête tradition of building a great evening’s entertainment out of a series of sketch-like scenes performed by a company of eight singers and a thirteen strong orchestra. The opera is structured as a series of birth experiences, each centering on the mother’s journey, and coming directly out of her perceptions of the world with the heightened sense of reality that hits us at such extreme moments in life. Inter-cutting the high drama of these scenes, the audience follows the gentle, nascent romance between Caretaker and Cleaner as they go about their work on the labour ward. When, in the final scene, they follow Cleaner’s own process of giving birth, PUSH! becomes more than just a series of stories – it becomes a celebration of the extraordinary experience of every labouring mother.

David Bruce wrote his first opera for Tête à Tête, Has it Happened Yet, as well as Seven Tons of Dung. He has also had works performed by BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, New Music Players and others and has won prizes including the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Competition (1994).

 

 

June 14, 2006