The Girl With No Door On Her Mouth

Stage Design and Lighting Design

Toronto, Ontario, CAN  2002

The opera project The Girl With No Door On Her Mouth was conceived and performed by Fides Krucker with direction by Mark Christensen. Philip Beesley and Dereck Revington designed sets and lighting for the production in collaboration with electronics artist Jim Ruxton. The project included a world premiere of The Girl With No Door On Her Mouth, by Wende Bartley and poet Anne Carson, and performances of The White Lodge by Gavin Bryars with a libretto by Jules Verne, and Mercy Suite, by Rainer Wiens and Victoria Ward. The project received Dora Mavor Moore awards for stage design and lighting design.

Tissues of saturated colour and text were projected on a series of delicate scrims including a filigree backdrop of laser-cut translucent mylar. The Globe and Mail writer Robert Everett-Green said, “Gavin Bryars’ The White Lodge… kept its gaze fixed steadily on a scene from Jules Verne, in which the old fantasist describes a sea coloured white by the presence of innumerable aqueous worms. Bryars’s sombre melodies floated like waking dreams above a taped score of tolling bells and sustained tones, as the French text emerged with a serenity that recalled Erik Satie’s Socrates. Philip Beesley’s and Dereck Revington’s set and lighting design used scrims and projected lights in a way that made the nearly motionless Krucker appear to be suspended in an opalescent membrane.