| Woman at Point Zero | |
| Composer: | Bushra El-Turk |
| Librettist: | Stacy Hardy |
| Based On: | Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi |
| Language: | English |
| Premiere Date: | 2022 (full opera) |
| Premiere Location: | Aix-en-Provence Festival |
Woman at Point Zero is an English and Arabic language multimedia opera in one act, with music by British composer Bushra El-Turk and libretto by South African writer Stacy Hardy. It is based on the 1975 novel of the same name by Nawal El Saadawi.
The opera reflects the book in having two central characters. A documentary filmmaker, Sama, persuades Fatma, a sex worker imprisoned for killing her pimp, to tell her story. As her traumatic life story is revealed, including various forms of male sexual violence and familial abuse, there is also a multimedia element including video designed by Bissane al Charif and Julia König. The opera concludes with Sama encouraging Fatma to appeal against her sentence, but she refuses, instead asking Sama to tell her story to the world.[1]
Besides accordion and cello, the musical score contains a variety of non-Western instruments, including the Armenian duduk, Korean daegeum and Iranian kamancheh, played by musicians from Ensemble Zar.
| Fatma | mezzo-soprano | Dima Orsho | |
| Sama | mezzo-soprano | Carla Nahadi Babelegoto |
Excerpts of El-Turk's opera were first performed as a work in progress at the 2017 Shubbak festival of contemporary Arab culture in London.[2] In 2020, this piece was awarded the Fedora-Generali Prize for Opera, allowing it to be subsequently fully produced for the operatic stage.[3]
The complete version was first performed as a production of the Belgian, with stage direction by Egyptian theatre director Laila Soliman, at the 2022 Aix-en-Provence Festival.[4] This first full performance at Aix-en-Provence was described as a "grim premiere" by Zachary Woolfe of the New York Times. Woolfe felt the score created "few new or intriguing colors" despite the "unusual combinations", and also criticised the libretto as having "flattened the two women...into cliché".[5]
The opera was later staged in June 2023 at the Linbury Theatre, part of the Royal Opera House in London, with the same cast and conductor. Gary Naylor of BroadwayWorld gave it a 5-star review, calling it an "important, moving work". Naylor also praised the interpretation by Japanese conductor Kanako Abe, and stated that this and the multimedia elements contributed to the creation of an "aural dreamscape". He further called it "beautiful and brutal in equal measure", with a sense of defiance. Further performances in 2023 included venues in Belgium, Luxembourg, and Valencia, Spain.[6] [7]
Writing for the musical magazine bachtrack about the performance of 15 September 2023 at the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, music critic Daniel Martínez Babiloni stressed the apparent Brechtian interrelationship between the opera's text, music, acting and scenography, with the performance insinuating "more than it shows".[8]