If you’re after something different, Sage J Harlow’s experimental chamber opera might be just the ticket. A queer, occult retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, it explores gender and identity with characters exchanging bodies and entering into contracts with eternity. The marketing copy advertises an “ensemble of noisemakers” who “fuse the grandeur of opera with lo-fi, weirdo improv and metal aesthetics”. The content advice, meanwhile, includes “sudden loud sounds, scream-singing, long silences, depiction and personification of death, spiritual and occult themes, use of haze, loud music, dim lighting and beeswax candles”. You have been warned.

Limelight Editor’s Choice

Meditation is a powerful force. O used it for liberation, until their peaceful passing. Their lover E is led astray by power and seeks to bring O back from the dead. They manage—but do not recognise O in their new body, so seek to become Death themself. Death is just doing her job. Until she isn’t. 

O,D,E is a new experimental opera by Sage J Harlow (aka Sage Pbbbt). A queer, occult retelling of Orpheus & Eurydice, grounded in the suffering that comes with simply being alive. Exploring gender and identity, characters change bodies, enter contracts with eternity and howl through the libretto as they do so. 

Underpinned by live music from an ensemble of noisemakers who bring a new meaning to “pit band”, O,D,E fuses the grandeur of opera with lo-fi, weirdo improv and metal aesthetics.