Mitra – Holland Festival

Mitra is the true story of Iranian psychoanalyst Mitra Kadivar, who in 2012 was locked up in a psychiatric hospital in Tehran. Director Jorge León turned her incredible story into a hybrid artwork combining music theatre, documentary and installation. The libretto is based on the increasingly desperate e-mails Mitra sent from the institution in the hope of escaping her Kafkaesque situation. Composers Eva Reiter and George van Dam have written sensual music, with vocals by Claron McFadden. The text, music and film images, recorded in a psychiatric institution in France, show Mitra’s struggle as a poignant, cinematic experience – a cry from confinement and isolation. download the programme book

True story: in the winter of 2012 and 2013 around 160 emails flashed back and forth between Paris and Teheran. The French psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller was corresponding with Mitra

Kadivar, an Iranian psychiatrist who trained in France before starting a school for psychoanalysis in Teheran. From her own home she was providing support to addicts and people who were mentally ill. That dedication cost her her freedom: after complaints from her neighbours (whom she said had falsely claimed she was psychotic), Kadivar was forcefully committed to a psychiatric clinic in December 2012. During this hospitalization Kadivar sent a plea for help to her French colleague, who started off a barrage of emails and launched a petition to free her.

The Belgian film director Jorge Léon used these events as the basis for a documentary (Mitra, 2018), and also decided to take the harrowing correspondence between Miller and Kadivar and turn it into a libretto. Together with the composers Eva Reiter (electronics and instrumental music) and George van Dam (choral parts) he created a musical production about a woman who is held against her will in a medical-legal labyrinth. In a hybrid form somewhere between opera, film and installation, Mitra depicts a cry for help from a place of incarceration and isolation.

The musical aspect of Mitra is in the hands of the Brussels-based Ictus Ensemble and six young singers from the MM Soloists Ensemble of opera house La Monnaie / De Munt. In the production they can only be seen and heard on film. The title role, which is partly live, is performed by soprano Claron McFadden. During the process of creating Mitra, León and his team made multiple visits to the Centre Montperrin, a psychiatric institution in Aix-en-Provence, where they were in close contact with the residents and their carers and relatives. León: ‘I wanted to get them involved in the project. I wanted to record their reactions of film, capture their emotions when they heard Mitra’s cries for help translated into musical form.’

This method was also a way for León to examine the current state of psychiatry in the West: ‘The project is meant to draw attention to our psychiatric institutions. We must dare to make contact with those who have been labelled as ‘abnormal’ either temporarily or permanently and have been rejected by a society that regards psychological suffering as taboo.’

And yet, according to León, Mitra is more than a journalistic or documentary interpretation of a moving correspondence. ‘What interests me most is to go beyond the present of the event, to give it a universal scope, until you are deploying it in the timelessness of the myth. To transform a prosaic document, i.e. correspondence on the net, into a stage proposition that flirts with codes from opera. To extend the range of words by the magnitude of the singing.’

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concept Jorge León direction Jorge León composition Eva Reiter composition choir George van Dam musical supervision Georges-Elie Octors dramaturgy Isabelle Dumont scenography Thibault Van Craenenbroeck costumes Silvia Hasenclever voice Mitra Kadivar, Jacques-Alin Miller singer Claron McFadden cover image Jorge León, Aliocha Van der Avoort, Thomas Schira child Laurenz Schäfer lighting design Peter Quasters sound Alexandre Fostier performance Simone Aughterlony flute Michael Schmid percussion Gerrit Nulens violin George van Dam bass violin Eva Reiter choir Hanna Al Bender, Gwendoline Blondeel, Raphaële Green, Logan Lopez Gonzalez, Pierre Derhet, Kamil Ben Hsain Lachiri choir coach Polina Bogdanova thanks to Aurélie Deloche, Julie Chenot, Fabienne Moris, Jean-Pierre Rehm, Bernard Foccroulle, Paul Aron, Julien Englebert, Amélie Derlon Cordina, Anne-Lise Gobin production Muziektheater Transparant en Ictus coproduction Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Les Halles de Schaerbeek, Théâtre de Liège i.k.v. IMPACT, De Munt / La Monnaie, Present Perfect vzw, The GMEM Marseille, Actoral Marseille en Les films de Force Majeure with the support of Federation Wallonie-Bruxelles, International Film Festival Marseille FID, Camargo Foundation, IRCAM, CNC DICRéAM, Thank you & Good Night Production, Interreg V Euregio Meuse Rhin & Wallonia, Tax Shelter van de Belgische Federale Overheid, ONDA

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This performance is made possible by

Otemba - Daring Women