Ana Sokolović’s Love Songs

What happens when you can’t let go of lost love?

A heartbroken woman embarks on a hauntingly beautiful journey, experiencing the love stories of different people in a desperate search for her lost love.

Synopsis

After the death of her beloved who was a dancer and the love of her life, a woman is in denial about her loss. Desperate to see her love again, she creates her own ritual, combining treasured remembrances with symbolic ingredients. In a remote clearing in the woods she attempts to channel the supernatural and bring him back. Her “spell” is anchored by the words, “I love you” recited in every language in the world. To her surprise, as she lights a circle of candles, she begins to vividly relive what seem to be her memories of their life together. Her lover appears as a sound, as a shadow, with every vision moving closer to her. As the visions intensify, the woman realizes that they are not all her stories, but the stories of others that somehow parallel hers, but with him always as the lover. But with every candle, every vision… there is a cost.

Content warning: examining grief and loss of a loved one; haze is used in the space; sage smoke produced briefly at the start of the performance may linger; unscented candles are burned throughout.

Part opera, part dance, all heart, Ana Sokolović’s Love Songs, with a new theatrical adaptation by Michael Hidetoshi Mori, is a haunting, genre-defying journey through one woman’s desperate ritual to defy loss. The work features soprano Xin Wang in a desperate dance with her lost love played by tap dancer Rumi Jeraj. Sung in five languages and with declarations of love in over 100 tongues, Love Songs blurs the line between opera, performance art, and ritual. The production is a co-presentation with New Music Concerts and showcases the powerful interplay of voice and dance in a visceral exploration of memory and healing.

Get lost in the dark magic and experience joy, heartbreak, and everything in between in one captivating hour.

Director’s Note

When I first heard the incantation of “Doves” in Ana Sokolović’s song cycle – the repeated “I love you” in language after language, it felt like a spell, as if searching the entire globe for love releasing stories of love. Listening to “Doves”, and how Ana repeated and evolved it musically, I felt that it was already a magical ritual. But what was the ritual? 

The song cycle itself doesn’t have a single character or through line – but it did have a progression from young love, romantic love, the love of anticipation… to family love, mature love, and the love invested in loss. 

There are echoes here of Orpheus – the ancient hope that art can reverse death. But unlike Orpheus, she is not descending into the underworld; she is trapped in the far more ordinary terrain of grief. Anyone who has lost someone deeply integrated into daily life knows the sensation: turning a corner and expecting them to be there. Hearing a sound and believing, for a split second, that they have returned. Denial is not weakness. It is a reflex.

What interests me is the moment when that reflex becomes fixation – when the refusal to accept loss risks replacing life itself. The piece does not judge her for wanting him back. It recognizes the universality of that desire. But it asks whether love’s endurance lies in resurrection – or in release. – Michael Hidetoshi Mori