Home is a quasi-dance-opera. It was commissioned by the Royal Opera House in London and premiered there in April 2012. Jasmin Vardimon directed and choreographed the work which is scored for two singers (Melanie Pappenheim and Victoria Coupar), three dancers (Luke Borrough, Esteban Fourmi and Aoi Nakamura) and the nine musicians of Graham’s band.
I used the notion of ‘home’ as a central core idea from which other related aspects emanate. These other aspects included control of environment, possession, fear, security, desire, self worth and others. ‘Home’ can mean many things, it can be a focal geographic location (as described by John Berger, below), it can identify a homeland or a place of cultural comfort, or it can be more personal and describe one’s body, and the feelings contained within. The desire to control or be controlled was threaded through the work, whether person to person, government to individual or corporation to individual.
At the foot of this page are some paragraphs from writings which informed the piece by John Berger, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.
The Stage, UK “Fitkin manages to work a sense of form and development into his typically punchy score – his amplified band, sneeringly noir at the climax, is pungently shot through with trumpet, soprano saxophones and hectically strumming guitar and harp.”
The Guardian, UK “Perhaps the most accomplished opera in the series to date….Fitkin’s sophisticated score evolves organically, never relaxing its hold on the audience’s attention.”
Classical Source, UK “Deftly conceived piece on the supposed certainty and real fragility of bricks and mortar, our shelter from the marauding world outside. Fitkin’s music builds to an impressive barrage of menace (with some wild writing for trumpet and saxophones, the video animation delivered superbly malignant shadows emanating from the fireplace, with the room becoming smothered in brambles and creepers, and the detailed choreography caught every nuance of ever more defensive gestures of possession. Home is effective and ferocious.”
The Telegraph, UK “innovative and accomplished but enjoyable, too. I left wanting more rather than less. Home is perhaps more ballet than opera, but what does that matter? It explores an atavistically powerful theme: a young couple (danced) move into their new dwelling and work at making it their own. But forces from without – tutelary spirits, eloquently sung by Victoria Couper and Melanie Pappenheim – menace them. Torches shine through the window and eventually some of the instrumentalists – trumpeter, saxophonist and clarinettist – break though the walls, too, as what seemed secure turns out to be exposed and hostile. Fitkin’s melismatic music and Jasmin Vardimon’s choreography both gather intensity relentlessly throughout.” Rupert Christiansen
The Meaning of Home by John Berger
The term home (Old Norse Heimer, High German heim, Greek komi, meaning “village”) has, since a long time, been taken over by two kinds of moralists, both dear to those who wield power. The notion of home became the keystone for a code of domestic morality, safeguarding the property (which included the women) of the family. Simultaneously the notion of homeland supplied a first article of faith for patriotism, persuading men to die in wars which often served no other interest except that of a minority of their ruling class. Both usages have hidden the original meaning.
Originally home meant the center of the world–not in a geographical, but in an ontological sense. Mircea Eliade has demonstrated how home was the place from which the world could be founded. A home was established, as he says, “at the heart of the real.” In traditional societies, everything that made sense of the world was real; the surrounding chaos existed and was threatening, but it was threatening because it was unreal. Without a home at the center of the real, one was not only shelterless, but also lost in nonbeing, in unreality. Without a home everything was fragmentation.
Home was the center of the world because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal one. The vertical line was a path leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld. The horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, all the possible roads leading across the earth to other places. Thus, at home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and to the dead of the underworld. This nearness promised access to both. And at the same time, one was at the starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys.
Little Dorrit – Charles Dickens – description of a room in Mrs Clennam’s house
Meagre and spare, like all the other rooms, it was even uglier and grimmer then the rest…Its movables were ugly old chairs with worn-out seats, and ugly old chairs without any seats; a threadbare patternless carpet, a maimed table, a crippled wardrobe, a lean set of fire-irons like the skeleton of a set deceased, a washing-stand that looked as if it had stood for ages in a hail of dirty soapsuds, and a bedstead with four bare atomies of posts, each terminating in a spike, as if for the dismal accommodation of lodgers who might prefer to impale themselves.
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – describes Charlotte’s home
“It was rather small, but well built and convenient; and everything was fitted up and arranged with a neatness and consistency of which Elizabeth gave Charlotte all the credit. When Mr. Collins could be forgotten, there was really an air of great comfort throughout, and by Charlotte’s evident enjoyment of it. Elizabeth supposed he must be often forgotten”
