Means of Protection (Wojciech Blecharz)
This work was inspired by one of the works by my favourite artist, Annette Messager, who in one of her folders (file no. 28, 1972–73) collected information on security devices necessary for survival and defending herself from “bad people”. The file contains flyers, newspaper clippings, information on alarm systems, intricate door locks, weapons, life insurance etc. Messager is obsessive and suffers from persecution mania; she says that collecting things protects her from death, that thanks to file no. 28 she feels safe…
The work is a study from my opera, commissioned by the Grand Theatre – National Opera in Warsaw (to be premiered in May 2013), in which the ordered, “anankastic” (non)reality of the heroine is continually being shattered by fragments of memories which return obsessively and which direct the audience to the discovery of a shocking secret and trauma experienced by my heroine. Means of Protection is in a sense a “reconaissance”, a “testing” of the means of expression, a gloss to the opera. In terms of expression this is an uncontrolled, filtered flashback or a reconstruction of a scream which was stifled in her throat at the moment of the traumatic experience, a scream which the heroine, against her memory, “will not allow to be heard” and which is choking her. The work was written for Anna Radziejewska, Maciek Frąckiewicz and Magdalena Bojanowicz.
Wojciech Blecharz
