Joe Bugden Email & Phone Number

Hobart, Tasmania

Hobart, Tasmania

'The Call of Aurora' tracks the story of Douglas Mawson's 1911-1914 expedition to Antarctica and his relationship with Sidney Jeffryes, the wireless operator, who, during the dark winter of 1913 went mad, believing himself to be Jesus Christ.When I began drafting the libretto for The Call of Aurora, it was my intrigue with why humans choose to push themselves beyond not just comfort but perilously close to, and often enough beyond the bounds of safety and survival. If at first The Call of Aurora seems to be a standard 19th Century hero's tale, it is certainly more than that. I wondered what motivations prompted those ordinary men to risk almost certain death. But by the end of writing the libretto the story had become ultimately that of the forgotten fringe-dweller. Sidney Jeffryes, which at first was supposed to be not much more than a walk on part, but which came to personify those who history had not just forgotten but who had intentionally been written out of history. So, in the end, The Call of Aurora is as much about Sydney Jeffryes, the mad wireless operator, who believing himself to be Jesus Christ, also sees himself as the medium through which the divine truth is communicated from God to man. I think through people like Sidney Jeffryes we are reminded how history favours the heroes and victors, how history discards or silences those that threaten its autonomy, and perhaps through this we, the observers might be sufficiently provoked and required to question what we're told to believe, to reconcile the contradictions in what we accept as truth and what we reject.

Hobart

Death by Defenestration (a chamber opera with libretto and music by Joe Bugden) is Bugden's 2nd chamber opera; his first, "The Call of Aurora" (2013) is based on Douglas Mawson's 1911-1914 Antarctic Expedition.Set in contemporary times, Death by Defenestration, deals, on the face of it, with two brothers, Darren & Trevor, who return home after years away, but each is struggling with their demons, their beliefs and their principles. With their mother caught in the middle, Darren, one of the brothers wrestles with what he has witnessed as an Australian war vet in the Iraq war, and the guilt and shame that he carries with him, and the nightmares that follow, from that time in his life.Since his return from Iraq Darren suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder; he still sees images of horror in his mind and has not slept properly for months. He is almost delirious at times, then stone cold, and seems to be losing his capacity to empathise with others.His older brother, Trevor is a proclaimed pacifist and atheist, and Darren’s going to war was in part, some way of differentiating himself from his older brother’s world views.But Trevor has his own dark secrets.

Hobart, Tasmania

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