Lindy Hume is one of Australia’s leading directors, acknowledged internationally for fresh interpretations of a wide variety of repertoire and progressive artistic leadership of Australian arts organisations and festivals including Perth Festival, Sydney Festival, and more recently Four Winds Festival and Ten Days on the Island. Hume has led a total of twelve Australian international festivals spanning the period 2004-2023, her thoughtfully curated and welcoming programs leaving a substantial legacy of stellar global creations, bold and diverse new Australian works, projects fore-fronting contemporary First Nation cultures, progressive socially engaged practice and deep community connections in regional and urban centres across Australia.

Equally at home in opera, Lindy Hume has served as Artistic Director of four Australian opera companies: West Australian Opera, Victorian Opera, OzOpera and Opera Queensland. As a stage director, she regularly creates new theatre and opera productions in Australia, NZ, Europe, US and the UK, including major productions for renowned international companies such as Opera Philadelphia, Seattle Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Royal Swedish Opera Stockholm, Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin, Aldeburgh Festival, Welsh National Opera and eight productions for New Zealand Opera.

In music, sound, text, narrative and style the four operas of MOTHER are four entirely different worlds, thus the order in which they are experienced by an audience becomes a major dramaturgical decision. We decided to split the evening into two parts with an interval allowing the audience to breathe and absorb the first two operas, Menarche and In Cosmic Utero. These two inhabit an abstracted space in which the cycles of the natural world and cosmos embrace the narratives, whereas the space for M*TH*R and The Lullaby is affected by human intervention and destructive human behaviour, fantasies and nightmares.

Through the simple visual gestures of a meadow then a burned-out car, the two parts of MOTHER are visually and thematically ‘opposites’ of one another: alive/dead, untouched/ruined, beautiful/ugly, poetic/brutal… These elements flex to encompass our four wildly disparate narratives ranging from Menarche’s spiritual ceremony of ancient knowledge passed from mother to daughter to In Cosmic Utero’s childlike universe, M*TH*R’s high-camp reality television show and finally the bleak urban wilderness of The Lullaby. It’s quite the journey.

This project brings together composers, writers and singers, a dramaturg, puppet-makers, a movement director, special FX, several camera operators and dozens of makers, technicians and crew realising costume, scenic, props, video and lighting design. We celebrate the musicians bringing these new compositions to life by bringing them onstage instead of hiding them in an orchestra pit.

Directing any new opera has its rewards and challenges. Directing four World Premieres to be performed in one evening multiplies those challenges and rewards by four. That the MOTHER project is a collaboration between two of Australia’s leading arts training institutions adds further complexity and almost limitless creative scope. While the sheer scale of this undertaking has sometimes been bewildering, it has been joyful over these last few weeks to watch these works take shape through the skills of all the brilliant artists, artisans and technicians – emerging and highly experienced – who have thrown themselves so completely into MOTHER.

– Lindy Hume

In 2023, I designed a project to draw upon and deepen the existing collaboration between SCM and NIDA, involving the creation and performance of new operas. This became the ‘Word, Text, Voices, Music’ Project in which NIDA MFA (Dramatic Writing) students (librettists) teamed up with SCM composers to produce works under the overall supervision of Paul Stanhope.

The four works that emerged underwent a process of creative development, led by director Lindy Hume, who has created the production. The project has resulted in the creation of four very strong works, all exploring the idea of ‘MOTHER’ from very different perspectives.

The production is a collaboration among NIDA students, under Lindy Hume’s guidance and follows a ‘hi-tech’ approach which is increasingly a feature of opera/music-theatre works. The cast feature students from the SCM Opera Masters course, joined by a group of undergraduate vocal students. The ‘orchestra’ for the production is the SCM Contemporary Music Ensemble, who feature onstage as a part of the overall scenic environment.

To conduct the evening of operas, I am delighted to be joined by Simon Lobelson, and Aija Draguns who will conduct her own work.

– Stephen Mould.

Please be advised, this performance contains haze and smoke effects, strobe and flashing lights, and adult themes.