Media - Audio

Michael Morris was born in London in 1958. He studied English at Oxford University and arts administration at City University, London, graduating in 1980. In 1981, he began working in the theatre department of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London and was appointed the ICA's director of performing arts in 1984.

Whatever Happened to Zora D? is a lyrical drama about a fantastical love story; a tale of a great and inexplicable love in search of fulfilment, regardless of how impossible it might be. Minna, a plain, lonely librarian, is suffering from a nightmare that returns night after night. The only part of the dream she remembers is a silver scarf, an unknown woman, and fragments of a strange song she can hardly recall. In her library, a stranger leaves a book open on a table. She realises, in shock, that it is the poem of her dreams; the author's name is Zora D.

The setting is the highways of the Arizona and Southern Utah desert. We observe several characters and their interaction with this starkly beautiful environment through their automobiles, their knees, a Greyhound bus, their sheep, an Amtrak, the Circle K. The travellers' lives intersect but never quite connect. They pass over the land but never really touch it, and the opera continues through a series of near interactions until the characters finally realize that they need to connect to the land and to a community in order to truly find home.

Sirius on Earth is a madcap comic opera set in an occidental metropolis, not so far into the future. Its inhabitants love, talk, and scheme against a backdrop of an oppressive and manic dictatorship; this is a world where singing the wrong song at the wrong time can deliver you to the Penultimate Punishment.

Liebeslied/My Suicides is the product of an unusual collaboration between an artist, a writer, and a composer to create a different kind of opera. In 1999 the acclaimed artist Rut Blees Luxemburg created a photographic series that represents a celebration of the lovepoem/lovesong in the modern city.

Non Guardate al Domani is an opera based on fact. It tells the tale of the abduction of Aldo Moro, President of Italy's Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrat) party in 1978, his 55 days of captivity, and his subsequent execution. The opera is divided into four segments.

A gravedigger works at a German cemetery, burning the corpses of the German nobility. His is a strange, solitary, subversive existence; musing on the wreckage of his life, substituting the ashes of illegal immigrants for the noblemen in the grand graves, and using the ashes of the privileged in his garden for flowers.

The libretto revolves around the elusive character of Arthur Stace - a reformed alcoholic and religious ratbag/visionary who wandered the nocturnal streets of Sydney through the forties, fifties and sixties mysteriously writing the single word "Eternity" in a distinctive copperplate hand.

A TV reporter is interviewing a young girl who is collecting signatures from commuters. The reporter also talks to a city councillor who highhandedly declares the authority's determination to cut down the cherry trees. The young girl and the councillor argue.

A clearing in a blasted wasteland. A mysterious prophet, Thwaite, and his six disparate followers arrive and build an improvised hut from available detritus. They forage for food and have a meal. The following day, after settling down to theological discussion, Blane (a mischievous interloper) provokes a debate about which of them is in fact this shadowy Thwaite whom they have never met.