Unidentified Subject - an experimental operetta in one act.
Originally premiered by Indigo Cook and Nathaniel Woolley for the March 2021 installment of Performance Calendar.
Restaged for the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival in the summer of 2021 with the addition of a Greek Chorus.
Inspired by the works of Roberto Bolaño and Richard Strauss, Unidentified Subject is an experimental foray into the archive – living and past, personal and communal. Through movement, sound, and light, UNSUB explores what it means to witness, what it means to wait, and what it means to navigate exile, power, violence and fate.
The pasticcio opera features a combination of original choreography and music with compositions by Richard Strauss, C. Tangana, and other artists. The libretto was composed by Interdisciplinary Arts Collective using text excerpts from Bolaño, Sophocles, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, and Carmen Maria Machado.
"Sometimes she felt like Elektra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, wandering in disguise through Mycenae, the killer mingling with the plebes, the masses, the killer whose mind no one understands, not even the FBI special agents or the charitable people who dropped coins in her hands.”
- Roberto Bolaño, 2666
excerpt from Coda.