Navigator

The Navigator is a part-opera, part-theatre, part-contemporary music performance that draws inspiration from the Indian epic the Mahabharata and the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The result is a provocative and visually delicious work which feels more like an erotically charged fashion show in a dollhouse than an opera.
With five singers and 16 instrumentalists driving the performance, it plunges from moments of sublime beauty and clarity to the dark, disturbed and the erotic. Kosky has filled this work with bold, experimental choices that are likely to divide audiences, bringing the intensity and power of opera together with the power of the visual aesthetic.

With passion, death, multifaceted desire, transcendence and transformation at its core, the music is brushed with the grandeur of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde but its searing language (which can just as easily melt into lyricism) is firmly embedded in a contemporary realm. There are borrowings from Greek legend and India's The Mahabharata.

Described as an "alchemical dream opera" about the extremity of passions, without a narrative libretto, it allowed Kosky to indulge his passion for exotic human behaviour, introducing a range of gender transformations, animal heads and bizarre sexual appendages.
In doing this, he took his artists on a complex journey, demanding skills well beyond the vocal, combined with a commitment to the work that any lesser director would find impossible to achieve.
All five singers were well up to this near-impossible task