Paola Bazelaire-Ferré

Maybe being a woman and enjoying descending into the catacombs today mean saying “fuck” to the men’s texts that teach us to be afraid, that educate us to be afraid. In these texts, the heroes who cross the underground, who endure the trial of descent and ascent, are men. Women, they get abducted, raped, locked up, penetrated. But we might believe that Eurydice likes escaping the surface, where men tell her what to do. In the catacombs, she has found a shifting space, far from the rigidity of the city, a space where she can crawl if she wants, where she can scream if she wants, where time is not dictated by productivity, where one can stop and get lost. The catacombs are another world, where one can dream, and this opera allows one to dream of another world. Making Eurydice sing in the catacombs is to lay a small stone in this other world. It is to tear opera from the bourgeois salons, to strip it from all its gilding and caviar. It is to set the interstices to music. And it seems that is what we have left, the interstices.