IV. Serenoid - an opera built on paratropes
Serenoid is inspired by the stories based on Star Trek, that come out of these fan-based communities. A few years back, in a chat group on the platform Discord which I’ve been part of for about eight years, Siouxie Gagné, another participant and avid fan fiction writer, suggested an idea for a piece of romantic fan fiction around two characters from Star Trek – The Next Generation: Data, the helmsman of the Enterprise, an android who is constantly in search of his own humanity and thus engages in activities like learning to play the violin (portrayed by Brent Spiner), and Geordi LaForge, the blind chief engineer of the ship (portrayed by LeVar Burton). In the show, Geordi wears what they call a VISOR, a device that accommodates his disability and allows him to see the full electromagnetic spectrum. During the arc of seven seasons, the two characters become best friends, and there are many heartwarming scenes between them, in which they share moments of vulnerability or emotional intimacy. This led Siouxie to imagine a romance between them. Her imagination went further, by placing them in a Steampunk universe alternate to the science fiction universe they originated from. Steampunk describes an aesthetic inspired by 19th Century Europe but with steam-powered technological advancement that would make possible the idea of an automaton or synthetic life form, as in a 19th Century steam-powered version of Data the Android. Steampunk is an aesthetic that is practiced by its participants quite excessively. People write stories, build little machines, make detailed costumes, meet for festivals, make music and put all their spare time into this hobby. During the promotion run for Serenoid, I visited the Lincoln Steampunk Festival. The impressions below will illustrate the aesthetic and level of dedication I am describing.
Siouxie imagined a first encounter between the characters in an abandoned ghost house in the woods in which Geordi seeks shelter, after his VISOR would be broken by a raging thunderstorm. He would hear Data play the violin from the ghost house and go towards it, only to find him broken and unable to perform any other movement than his music making. Over the span of Geordi “fixing” Data, they would connect, and a romance would develop between them. Back then, I jokingly remarked “this would make such a good opera as well” and left it at that. Only, it wouldn’t let me go. Siouxie gave me her blessing to take the idea further.
I ended up writing large parts of the libretto myself, with Wyatt Gaer as a co-librettist. We decided to make something new out of that idea, that had little to do with Star Trek – also for reasons of not infringing upon copyrights. So we gender-swapped the characters and built a new world around them, keeping only the basic character concepts. Geordi LaForge became Xaven and Data became Corrie. In the following chapters, I will explain how these characters and their subversions as well as the storyline fit into the paratropes I have outlined earlier. I am hoping to show that it’s not only the story that came out of a fan fiction space, but that we tried to make something that is a true fusion in terms of dealing with obstacles and character developments like fan fiction would, rather than a piece of mainstream media, by writing an authentic blind character through Victoria’s input, who still gets a fairytale ending, by making the storyline about arcs of overcoming loneliness rather than finding superficial romance, and by keeping the process as open and collaborative as possible, whilst maintaining the format of an opera (all text is sung, the ensemble is conducted, the singing style is a bel canto aesthetic) as well as a Western contemporary art music aesthetic. I believe that blending those worlds in a way as authentic as possible will speak to a broader audience from both worlds.
Victoria is a riveting person. She is soft-spoken, yet concise and speaks with agency. And she hates green. She is very synaesthetic, colour – despite her blindness – is her life. She tells me my voice is “sort of burgundy” – I’m glad to hear it because that’s one of my favourite colours. Strings sound golden to her, brass instruments grey. Gunmetal grey, to be precise. My plans to light the stage in green and score for trombone are out the window. The first meeting is on zoom. After that, I can’t wait to meet her in real life. When it finally happens, in August 2023, I’m understandably nervous. She suggests to meet at Café Venezia somewhere close to her flat in West London. I’m early, staking out the place. It’s full of colour. The front bit with the astonishing cake display is painted in teal with fake tropical plants and parrots. The narrow space leads into a conservatory that is designed with a bias towards pink, fabric cherry blossoms and roses. Victoria comes in slowly with her cane, wearing a stunning summer dress with pink, orange and yellow spots on it. I greet her, carefully. I feel like it would be easy to startle someone when they can’t see you. "May I safely assume that you want to sit in the pink bit in the back and not in the green bit in the front”, I ask. She reaches out for my arm and I take it. Her head tilts in the direction of my voice and her forehead wrinkles. “No one ever told me there was a green bit and a pink bit”, she says with a hint of outrage.
Xaven and Geordi LaForge
Like Geordi LaForge (photo below), Xaven is a blind engineer. She is also a person of colour, but this does not influence the narrative in this case, just like it doesn’t influence Geordi’s narrative. Neither character’s skin colour is much discussed, because they both live in somewhat utopian societies where it is neither an obstacle nor reason for presumptions and judgement. We can only hope that this may be achieved in our society one day.
Whilst Geordi is fully integrated and respected and his blindness also doesn’t stop him or make life harder for him thanks to the visor device, Xaven – despite her own version of the visor – does face struggles. (It is notable here that in the Steampunk Alternate Universe that we chose for the setting of the story, Victoria wears a pair of goggles predominantly on her head. She chose this detail of costuming because she says that cybernetic eyes are often on the forehead rather than “replacing” the actual eyeballs.) Because Xaven as a character was modelled on Geordi, it never occurred to us that she wouldn’t be a blind person of colour. Tête-à-Tête Artistic Director Bill Bankes-Jones recommended Victoria Oruwari as a consultant when we first pitched the idea to him. But in the course of a few meetings and after hearing her sing, it became clear very quickly, that she wanted to sing the role. She told me that she’d never been hired to do staged opera because of her disability’s health and safety implications but that she would love to do more acting and staged work instead of being stationary as a concert singer. I was somewhat unaware of the political implications of this casting because in the community the story came from, characters like Geordi and Xaven are normalised.
Visual impairment and isolation
It's no surprise that people with visual impairments are more likely to suffer from isolation and loneliness. There are regular studies on this subject, most recently by the Fight for Sight/Vision Foundation in an article by the Association of Optometrists.
The article quotes one participant in the survey: “I wouldn't want to be friends with me, probably. People get put off from hanging out with you, and who can blame them.” Victoria herself, in one of our sessions to prepare the libretto, said that the hardest thing about being blind was overcoming the isolation. She further explains that many blind people “haven’t been socialised” and thus don’t realise that experiences like going out, visiting concerts or participating in other social activities are open to them. Victoria explains further, that many of them are caught in the trap of trying to prove that they are worthy of someone’s time (same interview).
In a phone conversation we had in April 2024 shortly after she received the Braille translation of the libretto for Serenoid, the first thing Victoria did was thanking me for “letting her be angry”. Xaven’s anger, frustration and desperation in terms of her isolation and her failed attempts to overcome it by proving herself “worthy” by surpassing her peers in terms of skill, become very clear in her first aria. According to Victoria, it wasn’t common for her at all to be allowed to express this. “We’re just expected to cope”, was her description of her experience as a disabled person.
Xaven is neither the disabled hero, nor the disabled villain. Nor is she the disabled saint, that Victoria describes in our conversations, serving the cynical cliché that disabled people are de facto inspirational role models due to their strength of remaining amiable whilst coping with their circumstances. It’s not hard to understand why a disabled person might end up battling with a lot of frustration, not only because of their disability, but because of the reactions and expectations of the able bodied and normative world they live in. Xaven’s feelings are simply human, and her expression of them in her breakdown doesn’t make her a villain or a rage-filled recluse proceeding to develop an evil masterplan for the destruction of the universe. The way we chose to deal with these understandable sentiments in Serenoid, is to allow her the space to face them and her destructive feelings in an authentic way.
Xaven vs The disabled lone genius
Xaven is also exceptionally smart and suffers from the double-bind of being isolated twice. Being made “more than” for her mind, and thus removed from the community, and being made “less than” for her disability. This is clearly depicted in Scene II when her colleagues express their worries and their relief upon her return after she encounters Corrie, but also don’t allow her to speak when she refuses to take credit for fixing her visual aid. When she is included in her surroundings, it happens in the form of pity and worship alike, but no one really ‘sees’ her. Instead of playing into the trope of Xaven remaining the lone genius and saving the world, Serenoid is meant as a subversion. It functions on the paratrope of “happy ever after exactly as you are” (see chapter 2) that is one of the reasons why fan works exist. The symbol we used for this journey is Xaven’s visual aid which is set up as a device that she invented and constructed for herself to “fit in”. By “making herself see”, she hopes that people will be more open to relate to her. But instead of making her one of the group, it makes her the exceptional one of the group, thus isolating her in another way. At the end of the opera, when she leaves with Corrie, she leaves the device behind. Symbolically, this is meant to portray that although she has the intellect and skill to build herself a new one, she now knows that she doesn’t need to be “the same” in order to find a loving connection and be seen. If she does decide to build a new device for herself, it happens out of a gesture of generosity towards herself to enrich her own experience and celebrate her skill, not out of a need to prove herself worthy. It also becomes clear that her intelligence is a warm one and the reason why she is set apart is because she needs to bring imagination into her creative and inventive process. Victoria connected to these sentiments, “I have been reading the script and there’s so many things that are so uncanny. A lot of the things in Xaven’s initial recit (“recitative”) was similar to the experiences I had moments after losing my site (“sight”, original spelling from the Whatsapp message). But after the realisation dawned on me, my brain kicked in and I started to replay images so in my mind I have constant images playing to replicate whatever scenery I find myself in. (…) my brain could not deal with constant darkness so from the moment I wake up till the moment I go to sleep I see things. I just wanted to let you know how accurate that was.”
For Xaven, Corrie’s sentience and autonomous intelligence are proven by the fact that Corrie has imagination as a musician. Xaven’s imagination, honed by the necessity to supplement and create images of her surroundings in her mind, is not only what fuels her genius, but also her language of warmth and her will to believe in and to fight for the connection to Corrie.
Blind Online community and identification
When asked about media characters she related to, Victoria doesn’t consider a blind character. Her thoughts go immediately to what she wants to be, rather than what she comes from, when she says she loved the characters that sang (same interview). She does remember being part of the blind online community, but for her, the experience was not so fruitful: “(..) there are several online spaces. I think there's a Facebook group called Blind Pen Pals, and I actually joined it once way back in 2014. But I don't pay attention to it now because people don't really know what to share, what not to share.”
But there are also those who find the online community valuable. Blind Yorkshire-based blogger and activist Holly describes her experience in her article The Importance of the Online Disabled Community: “Connecting with the online disabled community means that we can support each other, be there for each other and relate to one another. There’s nothing quite like talking to other people that just get it.”
The whole article is about overcoming isolation by finding your community online and thus being inspired to find a community in the real world. “Finding like-mindedness and learning you’re not alone with your concerns can be life-changing, just as it can be life-changing to encounter a character in your favourite story that ‘gets it’ by struggling with and overcoming the same obstacles.”
Blind representation in Star Trek – The Next Generation in the form of Geordi LaForge has also inspired many who live with blindness. In his article Geordi LaForge shines a light on the blind community on the Online Fan Magazine Redshirts Always Die, writer and Star Trek fan Cameron Black describes the impact that the character had on him:
“Geordi was one of the earliest examples of a completely blind character on television (…) and not only was Geordi totally blind, he did not view it as a hindrance, but rather he was proud to be so.” He further writes: “(…) in the same vein as Geordi, I am not ashamed of my blindness, nor do I wish I was any different at all. This is exactly the way I was made, it was not a mistake or an accident. Despite our “disabilities” and maybe sometimes even because of them, Geordi, me, and so many just like us, live rich, fulfilling lives, and Geordi was one of the first, if not the first, example of this type of independence from someone with a “disability” on a mainstream television program.”
Corrie and Data
Like her Star Trek counterpart Data (photo below), Corrie is an android. She also plays the violin like Data does in the series. But whilst for Data, it is another way to explore humanity and his own humanity by choosing an instrument commonly seen as extremely emotionally expressive, for Corrie, playing the violin is initially symbolic of cementing an outsider or servant status, because she was taught to play as part of her duties as domestic aid and for others’ entertainment. It only later becomes something that she makes her own and that proves her sentience and creative powers. In the show, Data is a member of the crew on the starship Enterprise, and no one questions his personhood until Season 2, Episode 9 (The Measure of a Man) in which he has to prove his personhood in court to prevent his dismantling and potential symbolic death.
The episode ends with him prevailing. Corrie doesn’t have to prove herself in court, but she does have to convince herself, which is her part of her journey. Whilst Data was not created to serve any specific purpose, Corrie was created to be a domestic servant and nanny as well as entertainer, and part of her journey is also understanding that these things are not what she is but what she used to do, before the family she worked for broke and abandoned her out of fear.
Corrie, Data and autism representation
Throughout the run of the show and until the present day, like his conceptual predecessor Mr. Spock, Data has been an inspirational character for people with autism and other forms of neurodivergence. The encounter and history of Data’s influence is recounted by the actor Brent Spiner and well documented – this excerpt is from an article at JLGB summarising a video interview:
“’I had no idea while we were doing the series that the character was speaking to so many young people,’ he said. ‘Particularly, [people] who were struggling with emotional expression.’
Spiner spoke of a surprise visit to his trailer on the set of The Next Generation from the late neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, which opened Spiner’s eyes to the impact of the Data character in the autistic community. Calling Spiner the “poster boy” for his line of work, Sacks helped Spiner begin to see the social value of a character like Data.
Over the years, Dr. Sacks was not the only person to approach the actor about the social effect Data would have. ‘So many people have told me about the experiences that they had,’ Spiner said. ‘I’m glad that I didn’t know too much about it at the time, because I think I would have pushed the writers to address it more head-on and it could have ruined the entire thing. I am honoured, really, to have been able to be there and help people, and not even know about it. It was a lucky accident in the creation of the part.’”
Whilst we were not trying to make Corrie’s character about autism representation, she, too struggles with understanding her emotions as such. In an article for Screen Rant, Rachel Hulshult writes "Data, that most atypical android curiosity, can’t read his own feelings as feelings, but that doesn’t mean the feelings are inauthentic." People with neurodivergent brains may also have difficulty understanding their emotions or may express them differently, but that does not make them any less valid. They are often perceived as “cold” which negates their internal world and dismisses it on accounts of expression or lack thereof. Instead of balancing Corrie’s assumed “coldness” with android super strength or an ability to do complex math in her head, thus playing into the autistic genius trope, we let her realise that she isn’t “broken” or cold, but that she has sentience, that she can connect with her own sentience and express it in an alternative way through her imagination in music. Furthermore, even when Corrie expresses her sentience in words or emotionality, she will not be abandoned again like the first time, when she has an emotional reaction to accidentally hurting the children she was in charge of.
Xaven doesn’t know what Corrie is, when she first encounters her. She notes the coldness of her skin, but she never doubts for a second that Corrie is a sentient and deeply feeling being because she encounters her as a blank slate and with an open mind for differences instead of an assumption of “sameness” or “outside coldness meaning inside coldness”. It becomes clear during the opera, that Corrie cares for the people around her, that she was left behind because she was “too warm” for one of her kind and that the family she served became afraid of her because she appeared “too human”. In her moment of acceptance, Corrie realises that she isn’t lacking in so much as she is different, that humans also cast out and abandon each other for various reasons, and that connections aren’t “reserved” for humans. She also learns that she is creative, that she has imagination and that these qualities are necessary for every non-normative connection, because like many of us in this situation, you have to make your own rules when you can’t adhere to societal norms. The trust between Corrie and Xaven is built during the time that Xaven works on repairing Corries legs when Xaven interacts physically with the fact that Corrie is mechanical whilst bonding with her as a person. Xaven is the first person in Corrie’s life in which these two things are not mutually exclusive.
Corrie vs the sexy robot girl
Corrie as a character is deliberately kept androgynous. Her wig as well as attire are inspired by historical domestic servant attire, which is her role in the family that built her. But there are also influences from the Japanese Ouji aesthetic, that is an androgynous style. We did consider they/them pronouns for her because an android doesn’t really have a gender but kept defaulting to the female pronouns because Taryn uses them. Maybe this will change in the future, but she is in no way sexualised. In many ways, the sexualisation of female-shaped synthetic characters stands in conflict with acknowledging their personhood and sentience and points to the dark underbelly of heteropatriarchal views on women and sexuality. Whether or not Corrie has any kind of sexuality is not discussed in the opera, nor have we explored it seriously in the character development sessions. It wasn’t relevant to the plot so far, or to the development of the character. Personally, both Wyatt and I imagine the character may approach this topic in a very different way than a human person would, given that her perception of her body, the amount of time she has been and will be in existence and what constitutes a pleasurable experience to her may be completely different from an organic person. In any case, if we ever went into it, it would be akin to a queer sexuality or a non-normative one which might take years to understand and connect with.
Fan fiction of the fan fiction
Filipe’s participation and contribution to the project was a real stroke of luck, not only because of his skill and talent as a singer and actor, but also in terms of his dedication to the project. Upon being asked by director Edie Bailey to think about the backstory of their characters, Filipe submitted an entire essay that outlined not only Merton’s past and trajectory into homicidal rage, but also his future and his second (but ultimately failed) chance at connection and a redemption arc, allowing him to keep Merton’s original character concept but filling it with so much detail we never considered. What has happened here, was a beautiful accident of having the concept turned back on us. We had originally planned to kill the character off in the end, but in a funny way, Filipe misunderstood this and delivered what was almost a piece of fan fiction about his character back to us. Instead of the Steampunk world we were evoking in the opera, he had translated his character’s journey back into a Star Trek Universe. And suddenly, Merton was a full character, someone whose dreams had been crushed, who’d lost Hans, the love of his life, in an accident and who has to watch from the sidelines as Xaven gets everything he ever wanted whilst also being plunged into confusion over whether or not his attraction to machines and androids is purely professional. Instead of dying, he is being chased off in the penultimate scene. According to Filipe, the character of Merton will in the near future find a connection with an A.I. called Larus.
This is interesting because what happened to us here, is exactly what happens in fan fiction so often. A character that is somewhat sidelined for whatever reason, is being made the focus by someone who identifies with him strongly. In this case, the singer who has to portray him has a vested interest in identifying with him. We never thought much about Merton’s backstory or sexual identity but Filipe connected to him in this way. At the moment, Filipe and I are discussing collaborating on a song cycle, with Filipe as lyricist, that documents Merton’s redemption arc and journey to closure. Serenoid – a work itself of second hand-fan fiction sparked ideas for another work.
If in doubt, make it gay
There was no indication of Merton’s background or his love life in the libretto or in any conversation I had with Filipe. But since Filipe himself is openly gay and engaged in activism around queer arts projects, he had done what every fan fiction writer would do – write into a character what he identifies with and normalise one’s own situation through a character to relate to him and oneself better. Write what you know, even if it’s not really there. With Merton, he had a blank enough slate to do so.
Funnily enough, after having a few conversations about the difficulty of his part and after changing a few passages to accommodate his voice better, he told me over coffee “I can literally only sing this part because I’m gay!” Confused over this statement, I asked him what he meant by it. He explained that most of his singing teachers had been women, because he didn’t need to seem “manly”. I had written for a bass baritone like I would write for a coloratura soprano – something that is not usually part of a baritone’s training but had been part of Filipe’s due to his non-normative relationship with his masculinity or femininity.
4.4 Fan fiction Culture and the shared experience of isolation
Serenoid is first and foremost a story about overcoming isolation by finding each other -not just romantically, but in a found-family kind of way. This is deeply relatable for the fan fiction and creative fan community. Especially those of us born before or in the early 90s outside of larger urban areas have struggled to find likeminded people offline. “Likeminded people” does not only refer to people who enjoy the same media. Often, this is merely the surface of the common ground for a deeper connection to be explored. But regardless of the fandom we end up in, and regardless of our differences, we all share the experience of feeling isolated in our direct environment and the experience, that you can connect to people very different from you by encountering them in an empathetic and open way. Whilst it is common for teenagers to feel “different” or isolated whilst they undergo the physical and mental changes that come with puberty, there are several circumstances that can exacerbate this isolation.
Online communities as a leg-up to find your place in the world
For many of us, this changes when we leave difficult circumstances at our parental homes or move to a bigger city or different country and thus into a more accepting and diverse environment.
Finding our community and likeminded people or having the chance to explore alternative narratives, no longer feeling alone with, and therefore excluded by, our experiences, helped many of us to lead more authentic lives offline. We found the courage to be more of ourselves and carry those selves into the real world instead of hiding them in a niche space on the internet. And with maturity and experience, we understood that fitting in and belonging is not the same thing.
Notable recent media examples of people engaging in fan culture to find a sense of belonging are for example Ms Marvel, in which the protagonist Kamala Khan engages in creating fan content about her favourite superheroes, especially Captain Marvel. The Disney+ show sensitively paints her as a Pakistani Teenager in a white world who bounces back and forth between her traditional family, her white-dominated high-school environment and her status as minor geek online celebrity “sloth baby”. She herself states “Superheroes are not little brown girls from New Jersey” and cements her outsider status by her obsessive being-adjacent to what she wants to be. However, when she takes up her own superhero persona Ms Marvel, she also grows in confidence and engages with a broader variety of people offline. When she is asked by a group of spontaneous potential new friends, whether she has a nickname, she introduces herself as “sloth baby”. Her online persona is where she first found herself and she is carrying it into the real world as a means of indicating that she now feels safe enough in her environment to share the person she is and the expressive freedom she has in her online community.
Another example of this is the 2023 Netflix movie literally entitled Fanfic. It tells the story of Tosia, a Polish high school student whose anger and struggle isolate her. However, online, she enjoys an almost celebrity-esque status as an author of fan fiction. The character she writes herself into is male. When she begins a friendship with Leo, a new student who shows persistent romantic interest in her, she realises more and more that she is transgender. Tosia begins living as Tosiek and we witness his first experiments with chest binding, his first gender euphoria but also his first struggle with transphobia and finding out who does and doesn’t support him. We never learn what Tosiek’s fan fiction is about, but one thing is clear from the beginning, his writing is the only place where there is space for his true self before he is even aware of his true self. It’s the space where he doesn’t have to hide and that slowly teaches him who to be in the “real world” offline.
In neither case does this “coming out” or allowing oneself to be seen solve all the character’s problems. They still face adversity. But they also give people a chance to stand with them against their adversity. Becoming part of an online community around their favourite book or TV show and creatively contributing to it saved them from isolation. Tushnet and Rosenblatt describe a survey they conducted amongst people engaging in fan fiction spaces and found that many of them had deep connections to these spaces:
“Adria, one of the respondents, wrote, “Fanfiction literally saved my life. Not only could I read and watch the stories I loved, but I could write them, get that pain and hopelessness out in characters and worlds that I knew as well as my own.” This characterization of fandom as rescuer was not uncommon. For many, fanworks represent an opportunity to meet personal emotional needs through engagement with familiar, even beloved, source material.” another, Ashley, recounts their experiences: "I was born with a physical disability called Cerebral Palsy ….When I discovered fandom in the seventh grade, with it came, for the first time in my life, honest-to-God friends, who just wanted to be around me because we all enjoyed the same book series …. Because of our shared fandom, for once, somebody was looking at me, and not my body. As the years went by and I joined other fandoms, created work and finally get the nerve to post it where anyone could see it, I gained other friends. Friends whose only connection to me was their usernames, their own fanfiction profiles and stories, and the way we all messaged and encouraged one another to write. I learned that it wasn’t okay for my family to think I was sick and wrong … just for being bisexual and not homophobic; (...) Fanworks are often dismissed as nothing more than trivial, derivative foolishness. But this derision is often bound up with negative attitudes towards feminine pursuits and particularly negative attitudes towards young women’s attempts to find their own identities." (ibd.)
The authors explains: “By rewriting and rearranging the portions of mass media that speak to them, fans explore and create a sense of themselves as autonomous individuals.” But better yet, they get to share those autonomous individuals with a positive community and make valuable contributions to this community, which encourages many of them, to do the same in their lives offline. This will be discussed further in Chapter 6, with the voices of artists from different disciplines that understand themselves and their creative practice as having been shaped by these communities.
Wyatt Gaer also shares this experience when she recounts: “I got into fandom as a teenager (...) to start writing collaborative fan fic with a friend. It was a social thing for me, though I wasn’t involved in online fandom spaces yet, and something that brought comfort and joy through a difficult period. Years later, watching Star Trek: the Next Generation during the quarantine period of the pandemic was life-saving. That was when I made our Discord server, 1701D Baker Street, and met all these wonderful people who are an important part of my life to this day.”
Journeys of overcoming loneliness in Serenoid
Xaven
Instead of leaning into the lone hero existence and making it her personality or adopting the role of martyrdom, Xaven longs to overcome her isolation, she just doesn’t know how, until she is forced to face her worst fear. Being blinded anew by the thunderstorm and frustrated by the helplessness and dependency she has fought to escape all her life, she is disheartened at arriving back at Square One. Believing she is alone, she lets herself suffer the breakdown of anger and frustration in her first aria (pg 8, b 43-113). She contemplates whether all her efforts to “choose the light” were in vain and laments that it doesn’t matter how hard she works, how bad it gets, she will never be heard (“screaming to drown in the quiet”). She also expresses her frustration with how people treat her. To her, the people who refuse to see her as she is, are the people who are truly blind. It is when she slowly calms down and questions what she is doing here, that she realises her other worst nightmare came true: she’s bared her deepest soul to someone else while believing she was alone. Her initial anger is quickly replaced by scientific curiosity towards this being that is Corrie. However, what she doesn’t realise yet, is that by facing her own deepest abyss she has broken the curse of loneliness and can slowly begin to truly journey into the light.
In Scene II (from pg 16), however, she faces her daily life surroundings again. Her colleagues flock around her in their patronising worry. When she tries to connect with them by trying to share the exciting news of Corrie’s existence (from pg 24, b 327), they don’t let her speak. Instead, she gets talked over by a hyperbolically glorifying “she could fix the world, if she set her mind to it”. In the staging, this was also expressed physically by the chorus cowering at her feet looking up as if they were expecting a great heroic story, but then not allowing her to talk.
The culmination of this frustration happens in Scene III with the aria To light my own path (pg 40). Wyatt Gaer’s words illustrate Xaven’s desire to connect and her struggle with how she is being perceived.
Scene IV (pg 43) begins with Corrie and Xaven working in union, a foreshadowing of their later union. Because Xaven’s journey out of her disconnection starts and finishes earlier than her counterpart’s, she is able to fight for Corrie and believe in her newfound connection.
Corrie
Corrie’s journey out of her loneliness occurs later in the piece. Initially, she is broken. She’s immobilised and invisible: no one knows of her existence except for the people who left her behind. Unlike Xaven, she is unaware of her loneliness, because she doesn’t believe she can feel. She knows she has been abandoned but the reasons for this are convoluted and cause her to short circuit. The first time she speaks, she simply repeats what Xaven is saying (pg 11, b 118), because she is less likely to be rejected when mimicking. She later literally asks “Are we the same?” (pg 12, b 132) as a means of connecting. It is a clumsy way of asking if they are both trapped, since she has learnt that Xaven is helpless without her visual aid and in emotional pain. Instead of seeing it as an exploitable weakness, she seeks relatability and even becomes curious about the reasons for Xaven’s breakdown (pg 14, b 151). The first sign of trust and connection between them is when Xaven gives Corrie her visual aid to let her fix it. It happens slowly and tentatively from the bassoon solo (beginning b 163,pg 14 until the end of the scene on pg 15, b 186). Over the course of the next weeks, Xaven returns to repair Corrie’s legs, and the two become acquainted and friendly. For Corrie, someone engaging with her person as well as with the machinery that is her body, is a new experience, because she has up until now perceived these two things as mutually exclusive.
In the beginning of Scene III in what we came to call Corrie’s dream sequence, she remembers her family life and for the first time dares to touch the memories of her abandonment (from pg 28, b 423 onwards). It transpires that her duties included those of a nanny for the family’s children, and that the children were hurt accidentally but by her hands whilst in her care. She remembers being distraught at her failing and consumed with guilt, and consequentially she was partly destroyed and abandoned. This is when Xaven, who caught the tail end of this episode, asks her to tell her story (pg 35, b 516).
Corrie begins to do so and Xaven relates to her tale of being an outsider, leading into the duet (Surrounded by light and family, pg 37, b 559 and following), in which they reveal to each other, that they are “the same” in their outsider status. This is when Corrie learns, that being human doesn’t automatically mean being an insider, and that ergo, not being human doesn’t have to mean being an outsider. It leads her to attempting to connect more openly at the end of Scene III.
In Scene IV, however, she takes a step back. She is repaired and spending her life with Xaven has become a real possibility that scares her. Withdrawing, remembering her potential to cause pain, she insists on saying goodbye, believing that she is still “cold” and that inevitably will lead to broken hearts as it led to broken bones. The proof that she has grown is manifested in her having improvised over, and expanded on, the violin melody that the family taught her as a type of lullaby, and that she is haunted with throughout her journey. The penny drops when Xaven brings her the original sheet music and while playing it (p 53, b 855 and following), Corrie realises how much she has changed and developed.
Merton
Merton doesn’t overcome his loneliness. In the limited space that is Serenoid, he serves as a negative mirror to Corrie and Xaven. He is a trope, too – the jealousy-fuelled rival that loses his position at the top, and that alone is enough to break him, because he is emotionally weak. Before Filipe gave him the background of a story of tragic loss and confusion over his inner world, Merton was simply an irredeemable child who in order to be able to overcome his issues, would have to give up his sense of entitlement. Although it may not seem obvious, on a certain level, he chooses not to heal. Thus he serves as a reminder, that healing is a risky business and that in order to do so, it is necessary to feel the extent of the pain first. When he sees Xaven and Corrie together, he gets a chance to look at himself and recognise what he misses, or at least, that it’s nobody’s responsibility but his own to deal with his feelings. But he chooses instead to go into the offensive and project his responsibility, Merton chooses to destroy others rather than face himself, which is why he loses out in the end. Both he and Xaven are inauthentic with their colleagues (chorus), but for different reasons. Xaven believes that showing her vulnerability will put her in a position of perceived helplessness and dependency that she is trying to avoid as she feels this is the reason for her isolation. Merton, however, isn’t seeking connection, he is seeking popularity (possibly he innocently confuses the two) and therefore very consciously filters the way he presents himself.
In Scene II, he misunderstands the patronising way that his colleagues are treating Xaven. To him, she not only has the skillset he wants, she also gets the attention and admiration he craves. The fact that Xaven is unaware of his feelings of rivalry, make it worse for him. Ultimately, even in Filipe’s version of Merton’s story, he chooses death over the connection with Larus, as a reminder that what has been lost cannot be replaced without the process of letting go. In the end, Merton is a metaphor for the coward’s way out.
