Loretta Strong - A Queer Space Opera

by Copi | Adapted by Oliver Dawe

Norwegian Academy of Music / Oslo Opera

2 Week Development Workshop

Oslo. September - 2019

Cast:

François Testory

Creative:

Director | Oliver Dawe

Composer | Josh Spear

Voice & Dialect Coach | Emma Woodvine

The product of one of the most talked-about dramatists in the French Language, Loretta Strong continues to shock and challenge all who come into contact with it, questioning the performance of gender, defying normative representation and confronting the realities of being marginalised - where we all desire to speak, to be heard and to communicate, even lost in space.

Set on the boundary between reality and delirium, Loretta Strong is imbued with Copi’s trademark racy wit and manic pace, intended at once to shock the conventional and to open up radically new insights into the queer experience.

A commandingly bizarre space opera, Loretta leaves a distraught planet Earth in search of an alternative place to live where she can plant and harvest gold. A delirious monologue that traces Loretta's queer odyssey through a series of one-sided, continuous telephone conversations with numerous people, animals and aliens on and off her spaceship, exposing the audience to her self-induced, profit-oriented isolation. Loretta is immersed in the incoherence and miscommunication of her cosmic exile. Her circumstances force her to speak from the margins in the strange poetics of ‘otherness’. Unable and unwilling to follow traditional narratives, Loretta Strong explodes outward into a queer space of her own, abandoning all form and logic. 

COPI - The Original Stage Provocateur 

Raul Damonte Botana (1929 - 1987), better known as Copi, was an Argentinian writer, dramatist and cartoonist who spent most of his career in Paris. Famed for his provocative and irreverent writing, Copi is best remembered for his prose fiction and works for stage. His special brand of surrealist, scatological irreverence for almost everything, and the humour and originality with which he writes puts him into an artistic category all of his own. Copi’s work is shocking and disturbing in the extreme, giving new insight into the no man’s land between dream and reality.