2013.

Ett ansikte is a written chamber opera that processes a complex family history, a legacy that has been repeated through the genealogy, as well as the people’s willingness to break loose. Time is at the same time, the stage room is full of pictures. Pictures that become part of the action and the music. The mother as the elderly returns while she as the younger walks around the house and wishes away. On stage: the bird-Daughter who has His eyes, the Young Mother, trapped behind the window in a life she did not want, the uninhibited Elder Mother, trying to make contact with herself and reach reconciliation and the House, she who has always been there, who seen but done nothing. The women become each other, animals and furniture, to be used and farmed. The music fetches sounds of the scenography and movements. The voices continue in the saxophones. The sounds extend, filter or amplify the expressions.

The design of the show is a collaboration between Dråpera and Minda Fiskum; opera singer, Fia Adler Sandblad; actress and Sara Sjödahl Callersten; pianist.

Music: Lina Järnegard
Libretto: Signe N Hammar
Scene and costume: Sofia Eliasson, assistant: Sara Erkers
Daughter: Anna-Sara Åberg
Young Mother: Minda Fiskum
Older Mother: Via Adler Sandblad
The house: Sara Sjödahl Callersten

Excerpt from the libretto:

Preludie
The house: she arrived too early, he looked so, is it true, if someone had asked her she might
said she came too late, too late to make a decision, too late to make any difference, but she
was too early as a daughter, little hands, what can they hold, other than a sweater edge, yet she wore a
children, one’s own, one’s own child, no one else knew about it, no name attached to it, no no attachment.

Act 1
Older mother: the letters should be unopened
Daughter: to love the morning in the evening, the evening at night
The house: somehow the child grows, why no one knows

Act 2
Older mother: all the time of darkness that is not night, I dream you that you must be there and so have you
already existed
Younger mother: one must be independent, not cling

Act 3
there are tears in time, such as in clothes where the skin is exposed and the hand can penetrate, touching
The house: a causal pattern, dominoes falling, unless the distance is too far between
The daughter: a woman has a mother enrolled in her
the bodies are women’s bodies, like a perpetually repeated matroshka, of birth and aging
she is inside them
Older Mother: I’ll give you life
Younger mother: a woman has a mother enrolled in her
her body does not let go of the child even when it is abandoned
Daughter: I, I

The show is performed with support from the City of Gothenburg and the Västra Götaland Region