Juliana Snapper • Work: 5 Fathoms Opera Project

Work

5 Fathoms Opera Project (2007…)
Five Fathoms Deep My Father Lies

Five Fathoms Deep My Father Lies — beyond the well-known verse passage in The Tempest by Shakespeare — was a multi-site underwater opera staged across the globe in water tanks, swimming pools, ocean grottos and (initially) in private bathrooms.

Juliana Snapper's 2007 Bathroom Recital (Los Angeles, CA, USA) — *2007 Bathroom Recital*, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

The project foreshadowed You Who Will Emerge from the Flood… (2009-2017) in that Juliana Snapper was already experimenting with singing underwater.

Five Fathoms Deep My Father Lies was taking shape around the material tension between water and air to explore the old lure of sirens and shipwrecks alongside the urgent ecological specters of drought and drowned cities.

Juliana Snapper merged extended techniques with Baroque naturalist tropes and cautionary Wagnerian arias (Erda, Kundry).

Each performance closed with a double chorus of local voices lured from the audience to the water; a chorus of lover suicides enacting evolution in rapturous reverse.

5 Fathoms Opera Project events

Among others (in Palm Springs, San Francisco, Los Angeles, CA, Woodridge, NY, Montréal, QC…), two events are to be noted, which took place at:

MoMA PS1 : Long Island City, NY, USA, March 15, 2008.
The event consisted of a total one hour submersion of Juliana Snapper in a glass tank filled with water, singing into an underwater microphone.

It was part of Ridykeulous: The Odds Are Against Us.
in conjunction with exhibition WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (Feb. 14 - May 12, 2008.)

Juliana Snapper inside a dunking booth, MoMA PS1,
NY, USA (March 15, 2008)

“ She managed to fuse intense discipline, self-inflicted trauma and the desire to communicate through the even the most compromised means, evoking a palpable power and rawness. ”

Jennifer Coates
art 21 magazine, Apr. 9, 2008

Read her full review of this event: “Juliana Snapper’s Vocal Hysteria”
AKSIOMA, Institute for Contemporary Art : Ljubljana, Slovenia, June, 20, 2008
(Ljubljana Faculty of Sports' swimming pool.)

Co-production:
- Association for the Promotion of Women in Culture - City of Women;
- Kapelica gallery.

The event was conceived and performed by Juliana Snapper in collaboration with:
Pieter Snapper (live electronic music);
Susan Matheson (costumes);
Paula Cronan (video).

The initiative was supported by many volunteers and some institutions: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the City of Ljubljana, the Faculty of Sport of the University of Ljubljana, the Club Norik-sub, the ŠKUC/Club Tiffany.

2008 AKSIOMA's program note

“ The audience gathers around a long indoor pool, lit from below. Snapper enters and approaches the water on her belly, stopping to sing ardently at the feet of one audience member, and then another and another. She is dragged mid-song from her listeners to the water and pulled along the surface à la Busby Berkeley. Her mouth slips below the waterline repeatedly as she sings. An electronic soundswell surges up around the listeners, and the lights blink out. A video plays on the waterʼs surface. Snapper has fallen to the pool's floor. Her voice rises from the depths with increasing agitation. After several minutes, her feverish singing begins to slow and members of the audience move toward the edge of the water, singing. Sighing, undulating chords well up from the water as their voices merge. Then, a second chorale rises gradually from within the audience: a cicada-like crackle of parched throats that vibrates against the juicy burble of mouths in water. The lights slowly dim. ”

Juliana Snapper, Ljubljana, Slovenia, June 20, 2008

A video interview in Ljubljana

PET SEŽNJEV GLOBOKO MOJ OČE LEŽI, Polnočna podvodna opera. Intervju pred dogodkom.
(FIVE FATHOMS DEEP MY FATHER LIES, Midnight underwater opera. Pre-event interview).

Footage provided by online news magazine Vest (June 19, 2008).

Press

Read Jela Krečič's review of this event:

“Art under water” (DELO dayly newspaper, June 23, 2008)
Read an interview with Juliana Snapper by Mojca Kumerdej about this event:

“Mermaid’s Underwater Aria” (DELO weekend supplement, June 28, 2008)

More about 5 Fathoms Opera Project

Read also:

A Mermaid scholar: an excerpt of Stefan Helmreich’s article “Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science” which appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies.
Singing underwater: Nina Sun Eidsheim’s chapter “Music’s Material Dependency” which appeared in her book: Sensing Sound - Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice.
Dress Rehearsal for the End of Time, Swan Song Chorale (with ballet intermezzo), an underwater opera: a review of Denniston Hill event (2009, Woodridge, NY, USA).

Read/Watch/Listen also:

You Who Will Emerge from the Flood…, continuation/culmination part of Five Fathoms Deep My Father Lies.
Bouche à l'eau, an installation (single channel video loop with stereo sound) commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland (Mar 25—June 26, 2017.)
Communities, Chemistries, Choirs… Site-specific operatic staging: an interview with Juliana Snapper about her performance of You Who Will Emerge from the Flood… in Warsaw, Poland (Oct. 2010), provided by Telewizja Dramatyczna Międzynarodowy Festiwal Teatralny Warszawa Centralna.