The Furies: A Laptopera is a retelling of the Greek tragedy Electra. Blending a number of versions of the Electra story including works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Jean Paul Sartre, this retelling explores central questions regarding how communities escape from cycles of violence, the role of guilt and shame in community identity, personal responsibility, how justice interfaces with cycles of violence, and redemption. The artistic medium of the laptop orchestra both serves to recast the traditional instrumental role in a new kind of operatic medium (the “laptopera”) that reimagines the potential of instrument-building to support dramatic elements and character relationships -- while simultaneously positing critical questions about technology in our lives presently, both in its promise to help us flourish and in its perils to perpetuate and amplify the existing cycles of violence in our world today.

ACT I
This retelling of the Electra story begins as Orestia returns to Argos, the town where she was born and from which she was banished as an infant. As she comes to know Argos and the curse of flies that has seiged this city, disguised, she meets her sister and mother and struggles to make sense of a home and family she has never known.

After the performance, there will be a Q&A discussion with composer Anne Hege and laptop orchestra director Ge Wang about the Furies, its instruments, and artistic process.

(Act III premiered in June 2019 at Bing Concert Hall; check out the video)