The Death of the Chicken, a work in progress

A work in progress workshop on The Death of the Chicken, a new opera inspired by Brothers Grimm.

Peter Cant, the writer and director, and I have track record in collaborating initially on a children’s opera for Mahogany Opera Group (Hughes/Cant 2017), and subsequently on a practice research project (Cant/Cassell/Hughes 2018), exploring integration of first hand testimony in music theatre.

In 2018, Peter created a new libretto, inspired by a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, the Death of the Little Hen, or The Adventures of Chanticleer and Partlet part 3. In January to March 2022, I composed this into a short chamber opera.  This short story touches on archetypal operatic themes such as love, death, loss and grief, but with irony and humour, because the materials (a dead hen, a pile of nuts, a straw) are small-scale compared to opera’s usual stage of action (Orpheus, underworld etc).

This fifteen-minute opera weaves a cast of 12 animal characters using just two singers, piano and electronics through a dream-like journey of lamentation, storytelling and disaster. A Cockerel grieves for a dead hen, his love. Animals help to transport the hen on her final journey, on a makeshift cart. The procession encounters a stream that seems like a precipice, with disastrous consequences. The story is absurd and tragic; small-scale and epic; dream-like; repetitive.

Inspired by Stravinsky’s Renard (1916) a short opera also linked to Grimm fairy tales, which separates the singers from actors/puppets, we wondered if ‘childlike’ materials could be enlarged and projected on to the big scale of opera in a way that would be convincing to and powerful for adults, through experimental use of live video and sound.

On Tuesday 21 June 2022 at the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts, supported by the Sussex Humanities Lab, Peter and I worked with two singers, a pianist, a film maker and a live sound specialist to rehearse the music, the live sound, and a form of elemental puppetry using children’s stickle bricks to represent characters which were then enlarged and to some extent animated on screen.

A record of this event is here. Please get in touch if you have any feedback.