Blind Love Bad Taste is an opera in one act inspired by a blind, foul-smelling shark.

Instrumentation draws from the image of a seemingly jumbled mass of sea creatures drifting deep in the abyss. Our host is a Greenland shark, the largest species of shark and the longest-living vertebrate animal on the planet. Superlatives don’t stop there, for its flesh stinks of piss and is toxic to humans. What’s more, ninety-nine percent of its species are blind due to the green-glowing, worm-like parasites that permanently attach themselves to the shark’s eyes.

The choir try to embody this mesh of species, glossing over the horrors they might present in the the human mind to find a different kind of intimacy between parasite and host. Love, maybe?

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A solo performance of Blind Love Bad Taste was first commissioned by FormContent in 2016 and presented at SixtyEight Art Institüt, Copenhagen. Then in 2017 with Rhubaba Choir at Leith Theatre, Edinburgh, and Cooper Gallery, Dundee.

Rhubaba Choir is a community of singers based at Rhubaba Gallery and Studios in Edinburgh. The Choir acts as a commissioning platform for new works providing invited artists, musicians and writers with the resource of collective voices as a material.