The Strange-TUNDRA Opera

complete photo albums for the strange-tundra opera:

CTCMBS III

CTCMBS IV

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The incipit and initiating art piece of strange-tundra was an orchestral ice opera called Anethemas or Roveses. Xxhe composed it independently at the age of seventeen using GarageBand. The music follows the events of their novel of the same name. The opera's score is unique because down to every distinct sound, there is an action being played out according directly to the novel. It is so precise that timestamps appear in the book.

When completed, the opera held an outstanding length of 7 hours. Xxhe revisited it after three years, selected many key climatic pieces and stylized them into the first half of a live show. It was called the Strange-Tundra Opera.

Set on a plausibly-theoretical alien world, the strange-tundra opera follows a young extraterrestrial girl through bioluminescent forests and jarring dreamscapes as she dances and tunnels with creatures made entirely of light whose language can only be sung and is unpronounceable spoken . The music, all composed in strange-tundra, was interpreted using modern dance, spoken word, high contrast lighting and light reflective costumeage.

Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş played the role of Scaarleas in this live theater poetta-bizarre interpretation of Roveses rei.

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Following an extraterrestrial girl Scaarleas, Roveses tells her story as she is born with white hair and pink eyes into a dark green haired people known as the Onés. She is brought to a distant abandoned temple in the deep tundra as a baby where light entities known as TheyWomen are rumored to live, and left there to be raised by them by her mother.

Scaarleas is raseed by the light entities and kept far away from the outside world. She reaches her nearly fully grown years and has never gone outside before. She had spent her years speaking to the light entities, learning their language, and copying down all that they said into books, and by carving them into the floors and walls. 

The light entities speak in poetry and abstract words. They sometimes make clear sense but mostly do not. Scaarleas learns to understand vaguely what they say and writes down what they say simply because she can. 

She is what is called an "Ashen", a special person born with white hair who can hear the voices of the light entities without feeling pain. Others die at the high pitched sound of their speech.

Ashens are feared as the light entities are as well. In the place that Scaarleas came from, the light entities are cruel and nightmarish bedtime stories. Ashens are rarely born but when they are, they are killed at birth, because they are too much alike the light entities speaking their language and communicating with them freely. 

Scaarleas knows none of this, and grows up protected from this knowledge until one night when the light entities open the doors of the temple and invite her to come outside...

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Experience the Strange-Tundra Opera at CATACOMBS through the eyes of Ж and Film Life Films. 

Shot at Monument SF, Jan 2024.