Me and Schumi found ourselves in a pretty strange situation the other day. We just got back home from Örebro. Dumped the backline, parked the car and went straight to the Malmö Opera. My girlfriend is in an opera (not singing though..) called “Death And The Maiden” by Ariel Dorfman (check out the movie with the same name by Roman Polanski) and it was the world premiere so we had to support!
The thing is, this is a very political opera about the horrors of Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and it was also the day of the big parade at The European Social Forum. My girl had been in the parade with her mom all day, and we got the chance to see the parade from the balcony of the opera. Surrounded by a lot of people who were very familiar with opera but maybe not with protest songs, we heard a lot of great/scary comments as the streets were filled up with police. We felt a little out of place to say the least.
I think the people at Malmö Opera should have invited the ESF participants to come see the show. It was very powerful and totally relevant, especially this week in Malmö. Nice to meet our friend America Vera-Zavala at the opera! She held a seminar at the ESF earlier that day.
Peace! / ´preme
