Dez Mona & B.O.X.: 'Lucy'

Theatrical between pop and baroque

LUCY lies somewhere between concert and performance, and between pop and baroque. Combining new lyrics, new music, layered images, tactile materials and enchanting voices, Dez Mona and B.O.X search for the meaning of coming home and belonging in a fragmented world.

“My fellow traveller
Where will we go?
Off the grid
Into the heart
All at once or not at all”

- Fellow Traveller

For this performance, Dez Mona & B.O.X were inspired by the Baroque oratorio, a musical narration in which a central character interprets a series of events to move the listener towards emotional and spiritual purification.

Recitatives (spoken word, soundscapes, ...) that drive the story are seamlessly interspersed with harmony vocals and instrumental parts, while arias (songs) form the backbone of the whole. The use of these different registers creates intervals in which space is created for emotion and contemplation, while the global tension continues to build uninterrupted.

Whereas traditional oratorios reflect on biblical themes or classical mythology, LUCY confronts a number of social themes: identity versus community, individuality versus togetherness, activism versus sufficiency, and the connectedness, but also fragmentation that goes with it.

Background

LUCY is the long-awaited sequel to the internationally acclaimed ballad opera SÁGA, which was created in 2011 after Dez Mona and B.O.X concluded a pact to fuse innovative pop music with baroque timbres. For the concerts at the Prototype Festival (New York, January 2016), the New York Times had nothing but superlatives left:

"(...) an evening of unfailingly gorgeous music that felt exotic and familiar at once", or: "(...) classy, sensual, exquisitely artful and unmistakably new."

The hybrid language of Dez Mona & B.O.X is timeless and contemporary; exactly ten years later, this is still the foundation on which LUCY is built.