Blue Woman centres sexual trauma around the female experience

The ending of Blue Woman as curtains close.

Blue Woman is a new contemporary opera written by Laura Bowler and Laura Lomas and directed by Kate Mitchell exploring the psychological impact of a woman’s experience of sexual assault. The stage is split horizontally into two elements. In the top half, a screen shows a short film following a woman in a broken down house and walking through the streets of London across the course of a day. Underneath, four female cellists are interspersed by four female vocalists who rotate between standing up and sitting down as the show progresses.

The music is provocative but jarring.

The cellists play their instruments in unnatural ways, at some points pulling a string from their sides to move in circles around the cello’s strings. At other points, they play the cello by bowing beneath the bridge and banging their hands on the instrument. The vocalists mixed operatic techniques with technique that would scare other performers- purposefully gasping in the middle of phrases and syllables mimicking the sound of someone drowning or having a panic attack. Off stage, a variety of percussion both instrumental and alternative intersperses the sounds of the voices and cellos with loud bangs. The result is audibly jarring- this is not music you’d choose to play on a peaceful journey, but it fit the language of the opera’s lyrics which went alternated between the woman remembering the feelings of the moment of her assault itself with her musings about her childhood, lost innocence, and the brokenness of the world at large.

Visually, Kate Mitchell did a fantastic job of handling an intense score with an equally intense but non-gratuitous direction.

The film focused on showing the woman’s expressive psychological state without exploring the moment of attack in a violent or graphic way. Instead, we see the woman dance wildly around a room, perhaps signifying her desire to let go and not have to hide in her body anymore. At other points, we see her trapped in a glass box, shifting around and trying to escape. This set of scenes had the effect of mimicking what it might look like for someone to attempt to escape a sexually violent attack without the woman visually being degraded through on screen violence, forced nakedness, or even another body. Instead, the attacker is never mentioned by name or pronoun. The result is that the piece entirely centres around the woman’s experience of trying to cope with the aftermath of the event. We see her struggle, sometimes seen through intense feelings of losing herself during the attack, remembering some of the details, the sounds, the scents, of the moment itself. But at other points her struggle is softer, her looking at herself in a train window and not recognising herself.

As a woman, it was hard to look away for the 65 minute run.

Even having never experienced sexual assault, I found myself relating to a lot of the emotions explored by the piece. The piece’s rotation between calmer reflections on the general brokenness of the world with more intense moments of remembering traumatising events created an incredibly raw depiction of struggle. The piece wasn’t gratuitous or shocking for shock’s sake. Rather, it was real and powerful.

Structured more like contemporary performance art than narrative opera, the casual opera or theatre viewer may struggle with the format of Blue Woman.

However, if you are prepared for something a bit more raw and are willing to put aside your expectations of storytelling, you are left with a powerful window into a tragic but common experience of many women. 1 in 4 women have been sexually assaulted as an adult. Perhaps more people could use an hour of understanding the aftermath of that reality.

I tend to dress up to go to the Opera