The Grand Weaving Opera
The RanaPlaza Disaster in Dhaka
The grand weaving opera
Textilmuseet, Borås
Folkopera, Stockholm
Summer 2014
Creative team
Music: Stefan Klaverdal
Libretto: Lisa Hansson
Direction: Helena Röhr
Producer: Linda Isaksson
Set design/Stage: Josefin Askfeldt
Set design/video: Thomas Romlöv
Lights: Ludvig Uppman
Costume: Åsa Gjerstad
Dramaturgy: Jonas Bernander och Helena Röhr
Performers
Hanna – Agnes Wästfelt
Shapla – Anna Forsebo
Tiden – Lisa Hansson
Musicians
Frieda Mossop – Violin
Nora Hedberg – Guitar
Miriam Klein-Strandberg – Harp
Andreas Vettefors – Percussion
Stefan Klaverdal – Conductor & Electronics
An opera about two female textile workers conditions today and a hundred years ago.
The contemporary character lived through the Rana Plaza disaster in Dhaka 2013, the past character had to make a choice between handicraft and love.
Visual art
The scope of the Rana Plaza disaster is incomprehensible. 1134 deaths.
Some of them remain unidentified to this day, some were just given a number to be buried.
My thoughts went with David Eaglemans statement “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
And I thought that we should be the ones to not let these people be forgotten. Thus came the idea to make a projection of all the names from the official list of victims.
The names fall like snow over the participants and since the sheer number of names is so large the text disintegrates to graphics - in the end it’s completely illegible, just a cloud of all names that are allowed to rise upward and disappear as a cloud does.