Ihos Opera

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IHOS is a performing arts company with an international reputation for original music-theatre and opera. Works are multicultural, multilingual and exploit multiple art-forms, blending voice, dance and sound with installation art and digital technology. IHOS has origins in the Greek-Australian tradition. The company was established in Hobart in 1990, by composer and artistic director Constantine Koukias, and production director Werner Ihlenfeld.

IHOS elaborates cross-cultural themes in modern Australia, and productions have been characterised by the use of unconventional industrial venues, and dramatic language - ancient and modern forms of Greek, Hebrew, Mandarin and German, and alternative forms like braille, semaphore signalling and morse code^[1].

[edit] Repertoire

IHOS has created five large-scale operas. Days and Nights with Christ, To Traverse Water and MIKROVION, were first staged in Hobart, and have since been showcased at Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart arts festivals. The Divine Kiss was commissioned by Access Arts for the 1998 Brisbane Festival, and later staged at the Theatre Royal, Hobart in 1999. Most recently Tesla - Lightning in His Hand, opened the 2003 Ten Days on the Island festival.

IHOS is also committed to large-scale community projects. In 1996 IHOS created PULP - An Industrial Opera, commissioned by the Australian Paper Mill to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Burnie pulp mill. The project is cited by the Australia Council (1997) as a national example of excellence in community arts. In 2001 Sea Chant - an historical community opera staged on a merino sheep stud on Tasmania's east coast - was a major attraction of the inaugural Ten Days on the Island festival.

Smaller music theatre pieces composed by Constantine Koukias and produced by IHOS include Rapture: a Sonic Taxi Installation (Hobart 1999), the chamber opera Spirits of the Hoist (Hobart and Launceston 2000), and Schwa, The Neutral Vowel (Hobart 2002).

IHOS is committed to presenting new Australian music theatre works by emerging and leading national artists through the IHOS Laboratory. IHOS involvement with Kultour - the national multicultural arts touring network - has brought artists like Latin Gypsy Experiment, Dya Singh and Rona (Persian and Sufi music) to Tasmanian audiences.