FIDES KRUCKER

If you think of opera as something sedate and comfortable -- sweet melodies and romantic stories with conventionally heart-rending narratives -- have a look at Fides Krucker. She's exploring a new operatic landscape -- dangerous, unknown and rooted in emotions that reach deep into the unconscious. The opera that matters to Krucker is the opera of the future. Forget about the trilling sopranos and belting tenors of the Verdi and Donizetti mould. In the works that mean something to Krucker, voice is the prime mover, and not merely as something to admire, as audiences have done with the perfectly shaped tones of a Bartoli or a Caruso.

The voice Krucker employs can produce beautiful sounds, but it also moves effortlessly into screeches and yowls, ranging from dark, masculine-sounding resonances to eerie, high-pitched squeals. "I can go from low sounds up to high ones," explains Krucker before a rehearsal. Then she demonstrates by starting with a bass note that fills her chest and then spreads up to her head, vibrating her entire body in the process. There's an unsettling, otherworldly quality to the sound.

"Yet a lot of my music in my latest opera project, Down Here On Earth, lives in the middle range -- it's lyrical, but not in an operatic way. Some of the segments begin as pure operatic sounds that move into chorded sounds and then move again into high notes that allow stridency and a scream to emerge. The result isn't a beautiful sound, "I call one of the notes the high B-flat of abortion -- it reflects the agony of the act -- and usually that's the money note for a mezzo. It's liberating going into it and then letting it become a multiphonic chord."

She's played a pagan goddess floating high above the Union Station spectators in Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer's Hermes Trismegistos, and a medium channelling the spirit of a dead child in the contemporary music drama Artaud's Cane. She travelled to the Arctic to learn throat-singing in order to play an Inuit woman in the opera Tornrak, insisting that her character's vocal line reflect the speech patterns of Inuktituut. Krucker has toyed with madness in Schafer's Requiems For The Party Girl -- which earned her a Dora nomination for best actress -- and run up and down scales in Peter Maxwell Davies' Miss Donnithorne's Maggot, based on the character who inspired Dickens' jilted, tragic Miss Havisham.

That sort of madness is behind her now. In part because of URGE, the female artists' collective she helped form, Krucker is into new explorations, both with that company and in her operatic work. Her current focus, Down Here On Earth, by Victoria Ward and Rainer Wiens, tracks Red and Mercy's troubled relationship in a savage world, one that bubbles with both inner and outer turmoil. Integral to the tale is a child who may be a figment of Mercy's imagination, the ghost of an aborted child -- referred to earlier by Krucker -- or some sort of salvation figure for both adults. With its themes of homelessness and dispossession, the opera moves easily from the literal to "what you hang onto to keep away from yourself and from being close to others."

Both Mercy and Red -- performed by Krucker and Richard Armstrong -- sing a wide vocal range, one to which some audience members will have to adjust. But while certain singers pride themselves in listing their vocal range, Krucker demurs when asked hers. "I'd rather leave that for the Olympians or the Guinness Book Of Records," she smiles. "What's more important is vocal texture and a singer's technique, which for me means repeating the same thing onstage night after night and not doing yourself any damage. The quality of the sound isn't important -- if it feels right to reproduce it in a certain way, that's the right technique, the legitimate technique. That's true for a pop singer or a jazz vocalist like Rachelle Farrell, who's stretching herself in new directions."

A proponent of extended-voice technique, Krucker was always told early on in her singing career that she had "lots of colours" in her voice. "People said it almost in a shocked way," she giggles, "but I thought it was natural to allow colours or textures into the voice. That's not the bel canto voice, of course, so I was caught in a fight between using those colours and feeling restricted as to how my voice should sound, with all the neatness of 'proper' vocal projection.

"But I see bel canto (literally, beautiful song) singing as the musical equivalent of a Vogue cover -- the kind of shot that pushes people away. It may look good, but it doesn't show or teach anything -- and you don't see anything below the neck. "Extended voice, on the other hand, allows you to connect with your whole body. Our society has so many body issues, and this technique allows you to use the body to work through some of those issues. Expression, art and musicality are all part of it, and though it sounds like therapy, it's really about using sounds that we associate with heightened life situations -- sex, drunkenness, childbirth, extreme joy or anger -- to infuse the production of sound."

The articulate mezzo pauses to organize her thoughts and focus her quiet but clearly pulsing energy. She underlines the point that if the world of opera is going to have a shake-up, the changes have to come as much from performers as writers. "In even the newest of works, the voice -- the form's basic language -- is left unchanged. It doesn't matter if the composer writes a different sort of scoring if the singer performs as if it were Puccini. It's only when singers explore other areas of vocal expression that the form will grow and break the mould of the past several hundred years.

"Modern choreography like Martha Graham's and classical ballet are two accepted forms of dance -- why can't opera have different but equally viable types of expression?" The mezzo-soprano points to Wiens' score for Down Here On Earth, which is set on five prepared guitars -- guitars whose strings are altered with chopsticks, paper clips and swizzle sticks. Sometimes they're detuned, the strings plucked, or at times they're placed on the musicians' laps and bowed. "It sounds like a string quintet at times, with that sense of chamber music. The sounds vary from the fragile to the raucous. The traditional world is stuck with regular piano tuning, but here the instruments and the voice work between the cracks of what we think pitch is.

"The vocal work I do as teacher and performer also falls between the cracks -- it reaches close down to the dark part of the psyche. There's some music you can sing carelessly, but here timing, tuning and feeling must be right on -- it's a tightrope that we walk in telling the story of Red and Mercy's attempts to communicate and share at an elemental level."

The URGE collective has clearly reshaped Krucker's life both onstage and off. In 1991 she gathered together a group of female artists -- musicians, dancers, composers, actors -- to explore creativity and training in each other's disciplines. After presenting two shows, the group reformed with several different members in 1995 and presented the multidisciplinary She Promised She'd Bake A Pie a year later. "We use our dreams and various mundane objects as source material. The result is improvisational and messy at first, but we're the ones who define a show and shape it. As a performer, I feel strong in having a creative input -- there's not the usual feeling of being secondary, auxiliary or merely helpful to the writer or director in charge.

"There's a high level of trust, so each of us can walk into our personal wilderness and not worry about being abandoned. We're free to go into the dark places and rub our edges up against each other, taking not ownership but rather responsibility for what we create. It's a great lab to grow in, one that spills back into our solo careers and personal lives."

Unearthly noises DOWN HERE ON EARTH Featuring Richard Armstrong, Fides Krucker, Susanna Hood. Composed by Rainer Wiens. Libretto by Victoria Ward. Directed by Thom Sokoloski. To March 21. Factory Theatre Mainstage, 125 Bathurst. $17-$21.50. 504-9971.

A dishevelled woman squirms in the agony of a nightmare while a clownlike man tries to comfort her. Splayed above and behind her, like a bat hanging on a window, a pale child makes unearthly noises. Later, a bowed electric guitar echoes the bat sounds so closely you can't tell if it's the voice or the guitar. The woman sings of dreams of skinless children. This is just one of many uncanny, apocalyptic images that define Down Here on Earth, billed as "a new opera for five prepared guitars and human voice." I came away from the performance with the feeling of having wallowed in texture and thick, sensory imagery. The guitars create an audible ground for this opera, calling up an amazing range of sounds that can be atmospheric or melodic, functioning as weather or as commentary on the drama. Likewise, the voices of the performers as they sing the text contain the textures of rubble, glass, water, animals -- a gamut of images both elemental and emotional. An archetypal man, woman and child are camped out in a post-apocalyptic environment. The characters have survived some kind of attack, in which the woman was hurt -- "things" were done to her. Fides Krucker's Mercy embodies maternal trauma, Richard Armstrong's Red is absorbed in protective love and contemplation of science and Susanna Hood's Child is a wonderfully ambiguous avenging angel/demon/urchin. The narrative is more impressionistic than plot-driven; words get swallowed up and wash over us along with music and gesture. The progression of time has been slowed, and the characters sing their moment-to-moment impressions. Vikki Anderson's set suggests monumental ruin, shadow and abyss, and Bonnie Beecher's lighting gives the feeling of a place in which it's always night but in which light can be glaring. The simply choreographed bodies of the performers are lit in relief against the stark set. Design, voice, soundscape, word and gesture echo on a preconscious level, defying attempts at analysis.