Salix brings ‘About Time’: Why an unfulfilled desire for children can indeed produce an opera.

During November Music, chamber opera company Salix performs 'About Time', an opera about ticking biological clocks and unfulfilled childhood wishes. A conversation about what IVF and miscarriage can sound like.

Listen to the podcast here.

Operas are usually about love and death, rarely about medical procedures. Yet About Time by chamber opera company Salix is just that: an opera about medical procedures. Based on personal experiences of directors Annemiek van Elst and Elly Scheele, a penetrating musical theatre piece about IVF, or In Vitro Fertilisation, was created. It is the method of getting pregnant artificially if you cannot fulfil your desire for children naturally.

According to doctors in London, where they were living at the time, Annemiek van Elst and her boyfriend had less than a 5 per cent chance of becoming pregnant. With the advice to start an IVF procedure, things turned out differently after all. Even before the first hormone injections were given, Annemiek turned out to be pregnant after all. Although that pregnancy eventually failed, Annemiek ended up having a child naturally, who is seven months old at the time of this interview.

16 years

Librettist Elly Scheele does not yet know if she has had a child. She went through an IVF procedure, but not to get pregnant herself. Having no desire for children herself, she decided to donate eggs to the egg bank. This is where women with an unfulfilled desire for children can go to get fertile eggs, if they do not have any themselves. Should Elly Scheele's eggs have led to a successful pregnancy, she may hear more about it in 16 years' time.

Enough material for a conversation, especially since at the beginning of this century, I and my partner continued as a loving couple without children after five failed IVF procedures. So this podcast is about childbearing, hormones, loneliness, biological and mechanical clocks. And about opera. Because ‘About Time’, the opera written by Scheele and directed by Annemiek van Elst to music by composer Tijmen van Tol.

Get ready for three quarters of an hour of candour.

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