Guy Cassiers & Kris Defoort . Lod, Toneelhuis & De Munt/La Monnaie

Following the successful international creation, 'The woman who walked into doors', in 2001, the composer Kris Defoort and director Guy Cassiers have decided to join forces once again at deSingel. Together they will adapt the poetic novel, 'House of the Sleeping Beauties' (1961) by the Japanese writer and Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata. The book is about the visits of old Mister Eguchi to a strange and gentle brothel. Older men spend the night there and nestle up against young girls who are rendered insensible after taking sleeping pills. What seems to be an escape into youth turns out to be more like flirting with death. In Defoort and Cassiers' opera the voice plays a central role and fantasy and imagination are separated by the bedroom door. In this intimate place there is room for lyricism. The outside world is dominated by the mundane and the concrete. Two melancholy worlds that differ in colour, intensity and emotionality.