The Royal Opera House, Rich Mix, Open Senses Festival
Duration: 90 minutes
Designed for adults
A deep, luxurious and disarming piece for the music of Janacek, Fred Thomas and Kayo Chingonyi

An intimate and mult-sensory immersive music experience for Janacek’s String Quartet, with original music and words by Fred Thomas and Kayo Chingonyi.
In this work we play with the sense of your own body in space. We surround you in textures, lift you up, disorientate you, and deeply take care of you. We play with your centre of gravity, proximity to others, and knowledge of your own body to create a disorientating, active and highly intimate experience.
Janacek wrote this piece inspired by the Kreutzer Sonata.
Tapestries is designed to be a redemptive look at the female expeirence captured in Tolstoy’s novel The Kreutzer Sonata. Janacek wrote this piece to bring to life the the pain and anguish she experienced at the hands of the jealous rage of her partner.
We couldn’t help being inspired however by Janacek’s own questionable relationship to women through-out his life. His wife, who reportedly struggled with her mental health since Janacek had repeated passionate affairs with women and younger performers. As well as his challenging but definitive relationship to the death of his daughter, Olga.
We found Janacek’s deep, introverted and obsessive lifestyle as an inspiration, we followed and delved into his life and interest in intimacy and drew upon this as inspiration for our own interpretation.
UK Team
- Directed by Stephanie Singer
- Key devisors are Eileih Muir, Anna Pearce, Ashraf Ejjbair and Linz Nakorn
- Food by Adam Thomason
- Perfumes by Sarah McCartney
- Musicians are Phaedra Ensemble
- Research inspiration – Janacek’s Letters, The Kreutzer Sonata, Professor Constance Classen
Disarming and wonderful
Vice
Thoughtful and unusual
This is Cabaret
A multi-sensory extravaganza
The Evening Standard
BitterSuite is at the forefront of companies catering to London’s search for the ultimate in immersive theatre.
itv.com
Experience music like you’ve never heard before
ID magazine
Compelling intimacy of whole-body listening
The Smithsonian Magazine
“There’s something disarming and wonderful about feeling as though all four of your senses bar sight are suddenly cranked up to a higher volume. I can’t think of many other theater experiences devised by young people that hit similar markers. There’s less of the giggly, wink-wink nature of things like You Me Bum Bum Train, and a lot more innovation and scope for introspection than Secret Cinema’s dress-up experiences, or the Goosebumps Alive show from this past spring. What works best is how intimate an experience Tapestries becomes, where your “handler” strokes, nudges, and pirouettes you through a piece of classical music that could otherwise be pretty inaccessible.”
VICE