Marc Monnet & Arno Fabre: Bibilolo

An opera without singers. A “ballet” where dancers are swapped out for plastic animals, electric trains, remote-controlled bulldozers, exterminator robots and smoke machines. 

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Marc Monnet. It’s not for everyone. But if you have a taste – and an ear – for the avant garde and the boundary breaking; you’ll jump right on board with this Greek National Opera phantasmagoria, based on the musical work “Bibilolo” by electro-acoustic French composer Marc Monnet.

Monnet’s composition was scored from a collection of more than 400 “old-fashioned” electronic sounds created with a Yamaha TG77 synthesizer from the ’90s. Here’s what he has to say about his award-winning work: “I did this piece with great liberty; I really wanted to enjoy myself, to not forbid anything to myself”. 

And here’s what the Greek National Opera has to say about it: 

“It is a dense, inexhaustible and chimerical composition whose sounds evoke an overpopulated world of feverish, incessant activity where humour stands next to terror, like in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.”

To accompany the sounds of Monnet, the GNO has invited stage director Arno Fabre to the party to deliver a dreamlike absurdist set that resembles a huge child’s bedroom. The idea is that the space will spark free-associative transformations; exhilarating as well as nightmarish.

“Stuffed animals will be cut up, dolls tortured and dissected; and ‘Duracell’ bunnies reach the end of the world and jump collectively to their death, while still impassively beating their little snare drums,” foreshadows Arno Fabre. 

You can’t get all that on Netflix.