Gillian Tan

The world premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s operatic adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline — a Royal Opera House commission directed by Aletta Collins at the Barbican. Gaiman’s novella is horror through a child’s eye: domestic spaces that mirror and distort, a parallel world that seduces before it traps. Turnage’s score holds that register precisely — lush and threatening in the same breath.

The video design works within the logic of the story’s two worlds. The challenge is the same one Gaiman sets: the Other World has to look more beautiful than the real one, right up until it doesn’t. Giles Cadle’s set and Gabrielle Dalton’s costumes established the visual architecture; the video layer had to find the uncanny within it.