II · Opera · 2024 · European premiere, Barbican, May 2027

Ruinous Gods

seven suites for sleeping children

children who fall into a sleep
they cannot wake from

Affected by uppgivenhetssyndrom (resignation syndrome), young asylum seekers become unresponsive, trapped in a coma-like sleep after the trauma of forced migration. While their families struggle inside a bureaucratic limbo, the children drift into an underworld of dreams and nightmares where history, myth and contemporary exile converge.

Until recently, resignation syndrome was diagnosed only in Sweden; it is now evident in refugee camps around the world. One survivor describes it as “being trapped in a glass box” (The New Yorker).

Inspired by the myth of Demeter and Persephone, the work follows a mother trying to wake her twelve-year-old daughter. The child’s journey through a subterranean dream-world is by turns painful, humorous and hopeful.

World premiere: Spoleto Festival, May 2024
Then: Barbican, London, May 2027
Forces: Six soloists, chorus, symphony orchestra
Duration · language: 1h30 · English & Sumerian

The music

ancient chant, maqām, jazz

The score, for symphony orchestra, weaves Arabic maqām, vernacular chant, Western classical traditions and jazz, moving between solo recitative and choral chant. The opera opens with Enheduanna’s “Hymn to Inanna”, sung in Sumerian: words by the first named poet in history, some four thousand years old.

The chorus is a shape-shifter: extinct migratory birds, sleeping children, refugees, gods. Through it, the children’s seven dreams become one collective song, by turns painful, humorous and hopeful.

A singer in red beneath a suspended rock and glowing spheres

Music: Layale Chaker
Libretto: Lisa Schlesinger
Direction & dramaturgy: Omar Abi Azar, Maya Zbib
Scenography: Joelle Aoun
Costumes: Sarah Leterrier & Calypso Michelet
Lighting: James F. Ingalls

Commission & production

Spoleto Festival (primary commission, 2024)

The story

seven dreams, one backpack

On the eve of fleeing Turkey by boat with her parents, Hala, a twelve-year-old girl, packs a tiny backpack with her clothes, but her most precious possession won’t fit. Worn out by the stress of the journey ahead, she falls asleep.

In seven dream sequences she follows seven other children who have fled war and climate disaster, only to learn they will not be granted asylum. The dreams echo familiar fairy tales: lost possessions come to life, and a chorus keeps transforming (extinct migratory birds, sleeping children, refugees), guiding her through nightmarish and fantastical landscapes.

But the opera also plays against these familiar stories: the real nightmare is waking up. In the final scene we return to Hala. Will she wake, or sleep on into eternity? When she opens her backpack, the world is transformed. But is it real, or a dream?

Based on documented testimonies from survivors and their families, Ruinous Gods resists the dystopian narratives of popular culture to make space for imagination and agency.