PRIMA DONNA

It is an intimate search for the self – a musical monodrama in which the audience becomes a wall: a silent listener to the soloist’s inner experiences. This is not merely a concert, but a theatrical confession in which the voices of opera heroines intertwine with personal monologues, poetry, and music. The soloist enters into dialogue with her reflections – Giuditta, Esmeralda, Lauretta, Musetta, Cleopatra, Margarita, Rusalka. Each of them represents a fragment of herself – a woman searching for her identity among roles, memories, desires, and silence. The performance invites the audience not only to listen, but to feel, to recognise themselves, and to reconsider what lies behind the makeup, behind the stage, behind the masks of everyday life.

“Prima donna” – the first lady. This is the drama of a theatre soloist who, for a long time, has been the leading performer of principal roles. Within her body dwell the most vivid opera characters: from the naïve Lauretta to the tragic fate of Margarita, from the coquettish Musetta to the self-sacrificing Rusalka. All these characters share her body and consciousness in equal measure. They live and resolve conflicts not only on stage, but also dominate their real life. Having become part of her very marrow, they seek eternal survival within a real body. At times, she feels possessed by other lives; at times, abandoned. Torn apart by the emotions of her characters, she begins to exist in a world of distorted mirrors, among thousands of “selves”.

Immersed in the life of theatre, the soloist becomes merely a conduit and asks herself: Am I only a perfect listener to other people’s lives? Who is the person looking back at me from the mirror? Sitting in her place of refuge – the dressing room, a space of relative confession – she performs a confession to herself and before herself, searching for her own “I”. Reliving her most powerful roles once again, she selects fragments of herself, carefully sorting and seeking a place for them within her body.

The life of a stage artist is always directly connected to the character they inhabit on stage. To convey another person’s existence, one must pass their experience through one’s own, their way of thinking through one’s own. At a certain moment, the “I” and the character merge into a powerful unity and speak to us – the audience. Sometimes there are simply too many lives, or perhaps they are too strong, and they begin to cause turmoil in one’s mind. Then one is forced to search for one’s own time, one’s own face, and the true owner of one’s voice.