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DIVA

~ 2018 ~

Best Composer Award by the Oslo Independent Film Festival 2018

Best Emerging Award by LA Fashion Film Festival 2018

Official Selection BFI Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest, London 2018

Official Selection Fashion Film Festival Milano 2018

Official Selection Shanghai Queer Film Festival 2018

Official Selection Everyday Arias 2018

ℐ n the drag bar and the opera house, cries of 'DIVA' ring out for performers who tear us, screaming outside the bonds of mere reality. In this surreal queer fantasia on classical music, Baroque iconography, and scandalous first-century verse, drag prima donna Divina de Campo premieres an original operatic aria with a chamber orchestra, enacting a space where the drag diva and the opera diva share the same skin. 

The Aria plays out within a dizzying Baroque fever-dream: Archived opera set pieces and costumes, contemporary fashion design, and faded 'high’-cultural artefacts are scrambled and reinterpreted to new ends, staging dialogues between art forms that traffic in the extremes of gender performance. In the embrace of a queer-led cast of actors and musicians, Divina wanders through some of Europe's most stunning Baroque architecture – but finds in its edifice something overpowering, wearying, even oppressing. 

Classical music is not a static or straightforward collection of projects or objects. It is a way to question our subjectivity and social identity to ideological superstructures. Potentially, it provides disenfranchised people, such as queers, with means of emotional, physical, and sexual expressions that may be unavailable in other expressive forms. Although somewhat the pop art of its era, this 'serious' music seemed to evolve to an effectively high-class privilege.

Combining a contemporary musical style with a baroque orchestra, along with other unorthodox instrument combinations and electronic sound design, DIVA yields a work that is at the same time coherent in itself and unique in its sonic discomfort. She sings a text drawn from Ovid's The Art of Beauty, advising young Roman women to 'learn, my dears, the art of beautifying your face'. Divina/Ovid give caution, however, as 'the men, in these days, pay immense attention to their dress ... and the wives can hardly outdo their husbands'.

What are the sonic boundaries of beauty, and how do we identify moral terms of integrity, gender equality and self-expression?

Combining the opera's diva with the queer diva of the 'underworld', this contemporary Aria will facilitate the contestation of boundaries, allowing each performer to individually and collectively negotiate the margins of acceptable behaviour and transgress them. Extreme registers in voice and unexpected turns of tonality contribute to a performance that is not forced by repetitious routines of norms but is instead sustained by a resistance to those constraints which effectively endorse some sexual and gender practices and make others illicit.

We are then capable of challenging the ideological superstructures imposed upon the performance of gender and sexuality: Music as a tool for the enactment of social freedom.

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DIVA

Awards and Nominations

Best Composer Award by the Oslo Independent Film Festival 2018

Best Emerging Award by LA Fashion Film Festival 2018

Official Selection BFI Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest, London 2018

Official Selection Fashion Film Festival Milano 2018

Official Selection Shanghai Queer Film Festival 2018

Official Selection Everyday Arias 2018

ℐ n the drag bar and the opera house, cries of 'DIVA' ring out for performers who tear us, screaming outside the bonds of mere reality. In this surreal queer fantasia on classical music, Baroque iconography, and scandalous first-century verse, drag prima donna Divina de Campo premieres an original operatic aria with a chamber orchestra, enacting a space where the drag diva and the opera diva share the same skin. 

The Aria plays out within a dizzying Baroque fever-dream: Archived opera set pieces and costumes, contemporary fashion design, and faded 'high’-cultural artefacts are scrambled and reinterpreted to new ends, staging dialogues between art forms that traffic in the extremes of gender performance. In the embrace of a queer-led cast of actors and musicians, Divina wanders through some of Europe's most stunning Baroque architecture – but finds in its edifice something overpowering, wearying, even oppressing. 

Classical music is not a static or straightforward collection of projects or objects. It is a way to question our subjectivity and social identity to ideological superstructures. Potentially, it provides disenfranchised people, such as queers, with means of emotional, physical, and sexual expressions that may be unavailable in other expressive forms. Although somewhat the pop art of its era, this 'serious' music seemed to evolve to an effectively high-class privilege.

Combining a contemporary musical style with a baroque orchestra, along with other unorthodox instrument combinations and electronic sound design, DIVA yields a work that is at the same time coherent in itself and unique in its sonic discomfort. She sings a text drawn from Ovid's The Art of Beauty, advising young Roman women to 'learn, my dears, the art of beautifying your face'. Divina/Ovid give caution, however, as 'the men, in these days, pay immense attention to their dress ... and the wives can hardly outdo their husbands'.

What are the sonic boundaries of beauty, and how do we identify moral terms of integrity, gender equality and self-expression?

Combining the opera's diva with the queer diva of the 'underworld', this contemporary Aria will facilitate the contestation of boundaries, allowing each performer to individually and collectively negotiate the margins of acceptable behaviour and transgress them. Extreme registers in voice and unexpected turns of tonality contribute to a performance that is not forced by repetitious routines of norms but is instead sustained by a resistance to those constraints which effectively endorse some sexual and gender practices and make others illicit.

We are then capable of challenging the ideological superstructures imposed upon the performance of gender and sexuality: Music as a tool for the enactment of social freedom.