Cathy Hunt delves deep into next week’s Labyrinth 2.0
As I sit across from Cathy, listening intently, and sipping my ice coffee at Tyler’s Milk Bar in Preston (great place btw), I am struck by her detail in exploring the characters’ motives and their psychological barriers to overcome.
Chatting with Cathy Hunt felt like chatting with a friend I’ve known for years. This is my first meeting with Cathy and in true Director fashion, Cathy starts by asking me about my journey to opera and delving into similarities between my personal struggles and that of the character I will bring to life for this – Ariadne, Princess of Crete. I love this part!
In this article, I help us get to know Cathy Hunt’s approach and what interpretation she will bring to our second run of Labyrinth at Abbotsford Convent as part of Midsumma Festival for the season starting 31 January and finishing 8 February.
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Cathy, tell us about yourself and experience in opera:
I'm a director and a dramaturg.
I've worked a little bit in opera. I did a directing for opera workshop with Lyric Opera - for people who have never worked in the medium before. One thing I love about opera, is the way it enables you to be less bound to the visual, it's more experiential. There's a certain suspension of disbelief that comes in opera where you have to go with these wild plots and allow in large extremes of feeling. I really love strange operas like Salome, Katya Kabanova and The Turn of the Screw where something odd is happening.
I’ve worked with Lyric Opera of Melbourne and directed a surrealist opera by Poulenc -Les Mamelles de Tirésias. It was very fun, we set it in the 1980s.
I worked with Chamber Made as an associate artist on Samara Hersch’s work Dybbuks. It had immersive elements and employed foley to heighten the intensity of a woman having a ritual bath.
I'm really interested in sound as a way of opening up subjectivity in performance. I worked on a fringe show The One that drew on ASMR. Our audience were positioned as psychics - they had to use aural intuition to respond to the sounds of a particular object to help detectives track down a missing person.
Have you worked with Forest Collective before?
No this is my first time. In awe of the collective dedication and creativity.
What was your first impression of this opera; Labyrinth?
I was stunned by the beautiful music and compelling performances of the singers. The audiences were so close to them. I was especially taken by Dan [Theseus], commanding the audience, instructing them what to do. I loved the thread dance scene and the way the music and singers interacted with all elements of the work.
It’s refreshing to see dance incorporated into the opera. What do you most love about this opera?
I love that the Minotaur is a character played by the grand piano and the way the audience is drawn towards the centre of the labyrinth - the sound and feeling created by the grand piano. The abstracted nature of that is amazing! We're experiencing different parts of ourselves through our hearing. You know, we never see this monster, but we hear it reverberating the entire way through as we move through the space. That’s powerful, because it's so much about the threat of what's going to come and the spiraling towards it.
Photo by Suzanne Phoenix.
Labyrinth is an immersive experience for the audience and you’ve had experience staging these kinds of works. Do you think Labyrinth would work if it wasn't an immersive experience?
In this show, the audience are positioned as the Athenians - the potential victims of sacrifice. Because it’s their threat, it amps up the stakes.
There’s something that immersion gives you. There’s the beauty in the music and the story, but the participatory nature of this means we're asking the audience to collaborate in making the story for themselves. To find in the space of the Abbotsford Convent what it could feel like to enter the labyrinth and the prospect of battling monsters (or battling internal monsters).
That's really relevant, especially in a Midsumma context, exploring the idea that our bodies don’t always fit who we are. In our version, Daedalus is a parental rather than paternal figure. Daedalus (inventor and creator of the Labyrinth), makes an extension of his and his son's bodies with wax wings to escape Crete. Pasiphaë (Ariadne's mother) needs a structure built to have sex with the bull that she desires. And the monster himself, whose outward form doesn't match Ariadne’s memories of who he is. Giving that voice to the Minotaur through the piano is powerful as it feels like there's something in what the Minotaur would say or speak that can't be fully put into words or enunciated. It's like we're asking people to take it in, his experience, without really trying to name what it is.
What are you most excited about?
I'm most excited about bringing all the elements together. The audience's experience is a key thread. With so many elements to bring together and minimal resources we are exerting all our ingenuity in thinking through the audience experience, encountering this dance-opera, the space with Evan’s incredible music all around them. It’s complicated, and there is an exquisite pressure of too much to do but we are surrounded by a lot of skill, talent and care.
This show is only 1 hour long, so why is the opera taking place at 9pm?
The space we've chosen to stage the work has a lot of natural light coming in. Like the Athenians being sacrificed each year, the audience needs to have the feeling of going into the darkness. And so in entering this creepy space where the light is changing and getting darker, it allows us to create the atmospheric charge to suit this through lighting.
With all the food options and other shows going on at the Abbotsford Convent – the audience can make a great night of it and then hopefully exit the Labyrinth unscathed. We hope to see you there!
Labyrinth - 31 January 2025 to 08 February 2025
As part of the Midsummer Festival at the Abbotsford Convent.
Cathy Hunt and Teresa Ingrilli in rehearsal.
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