the libretto

Libretto

The Libretto draws upon the images created in the novel by Huxley and explores these images in the context of the contemporary society in Europe. What was once Huxle’s nightmarish fantasy of the future society seems to become a manual of the presence and sheds a blazing light on the politics of inter-human relations in the current world.

„Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of ‚Nineteen Eighty-Four‘ is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in ‚Brave New World‘. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.“

Aldous Huxley in a letter to George Orwell

21 October, 1949

Exploring the notion of communication of the future society, as proposed by Huxley, the language of the World State gets form of the globalised version of English, as popularised by mass media and advertisement. The libretto reflects on the language and inter-human communication in the era of time efficiency and social media networks. The inhabitants of the World State communicate using pre-existent short efficient phrases, without reflecting on the actual meaning of their words, neither on the beauty and possibilities of the language. Their communication is shaped by the technology and time/space limitation of social media communication like e-mail, twitter and facebook. The poetry of the language is replaces by brief, catchy and impersonal copywriting.

On the contrary, the language of the Savage Reservation is a dialect, a local version of a language, still able to express the nuances and complexity of human emotions. Libretto explores the opposition of the global uniformed society, and the diversity of small local cultures and languages in Europe. The inhabitants of the Savage Reservation speak a dialect created out of the elements of non-major European languages e.g. Catalan, Polish. The languages represented in the creative team of the project determine the choice for these languages.