Elif Karlidag : Open Fund for Music Creators
Elif Karlidag
Elif Karlidag is a Turkish/British composer known for her multidisciplinary projects and community-focused work. She has collaborated with various ensembles and artists and co-founded ELSE (East London Sound Ensemble), as a platform for underrepresented voices in contemporary classical music. Elif has composed music for various documentaries, feature films and interdisciplinary art projects including Marguerite Humeau’s sculpture exhibition “Oscillations”. Her recent commissions include work for the English National Opera and the Three Choirs Festival with the Carice Singers. Holding a Master’s degree from Izmir DEU State Conservatoire and the Guildhall School of Music, she’s also the current John Clementi Collard Fellow.
The Game Opera
The Game is a short opera for four singers, silent actor, and fixed/live electronics which blends traditional opera with modern interactive storytelling. It is propelled by an experimental, narrative-driven, first-person video game. In essence, it is a dark comedy about the human relationship with technology and digital culture which incorporates all the absurdity, wit, existential ponderings of the void, individual isolation, and self-discovery that marks our current age. In the opera, a Sisyphean narrative unfolds as the main character attempts to escape from a labyrinth of their own escapisms: an increasingly surreal, virtual version of the Cockpit Theatre inhabited by absurdities which reflect back to us some part of how our relationship to technology delights, distracts, derails, delimits, and defines us; how it isolates us to/in our own enjoyment and potentially against our will.