The beach is now just a stroll away for people in Sydney’s CBD. Eighty thousand litres of sand, piled 5-7cm deep, has been dumped into the ornate interior of the heritage-listed Town Hall, in one of the city’s most ambitious festival offerings.
Sun & Sea might seem like the ultimate homegrown offering for an Australian summer festival. Opera singers – in swimmers – perform in the sand as children and dogs romp freely among them. Frisbees are thrown and volleyball nets are erected. But it has come from far away, from a country less known for its beach culture – Lithuania – where it premiered in 2017.
Two years later the libretto was translated into English and presented at the Venice Biennale. It was a surprise hit, collecting the biennale’s highest award for country participation, the Golden Lion.
“This year’s haunting, standout show is Lithuania’s beach full of doomed sunbathers,” the Guardian’s Adrian Searle wrote at the time, describing Sun & Sea as a “seductive performance … beautifully sung by the lounging tourists as we watch from our balcony, our ticket to the end of the world”.
For it is an apocalyptic piece: beneath the protective sheen of suntan lotion, beach umbrellas and sunglasses, the cast of Sun & Sea reveal their mundane thoughts on a rapidly disintegrating planet: global destruction is happening around us while we’re busy doing other things – or nothing at all.
To some, an opera about the climate crisis might sound earnest, worthy and dull. But Sun & Sea appears to attract high praise wherever it goes: Germany, Greece, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Italy, Argentina, Sweden. When London’s Serpentine Galleries launched a coproduction in 2020, Time Out described it as a “heartbreakingly beautiful elegy for our relationship with the planet”. During its sold-out season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the New York Times proclaimed Sun & Sea to be one of the greatest achievements in performance of the last 10 years.
The opera is the second collaboration between a trio of Lithuanian creatives: composer Lina Lapelytė, librettist Vaiva Grainytė and director Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė.
Their first collaboration, Have a Good Day, was an opera about consumerism, sung by 10 cashiers in a supermarket. It was so well-received that the three women were keen to work together again.
Barzdžiukaitė had been working on a documentary, Acid Forest, which told the bizarre true story of a dying forest in Lithuania that became a major tourist attraction. Telling the story of the destruction of an ecosystem through a wry creative lens appealed to her. Later, while attending a performance at New York’s Guggenheim Museum where the audience peered down from Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic spiral staircase, she realised looking down from above was the perfect angle for humankind to observe its slow destruction.
Sun & Sea has played in a baroque theatre in Rome, an abandoned swimming pool in Luckenwalde and a car factory in Philadelphia, but always with the performers in some form of sand-covered pit, beneath the audience. The Sydney production will cover the largest area for the opera to date, but the Town Hall is less tiered than other performance spaces where it has been staged.
“The content remains the same but the setting also adds something to the meaning of it; it is always changing,” Barzdžiukaitė says.
Locality plays a part in Sun & Sea wherever it is performed, with local extras asked to frolic and lounge among the singers, and bring their children and dogs. Performances have been challenged by barking canines and kids kicking sand into the mouths of divas launching into arias. The singers are already challenged enough by being compelled to sing in a prone position so the audience above can see their faces.
“The spontaneity of it all makes it fun and unpredictable for the audience,” says Lapelytė. “But you do need a certain type of opera singer who is prepared to work outside that safe environment.”
Sun & Sea plays at the Sydney festival until 8 January
