What if suicide wasn’t just despair? This Singapore drag opera challenges a feminine taboo

Take Henry Purcell’s seminal opera Dido and Aeneas, add elements of drag and ballroom voguing culture, crank it up with the pulsating beats of Japanese DJ Toru Yamanaka – and you get a 337-year-old classic reimagined for today’s audiences.

That’s exactly what T:>Works director Ong Keng Sen has done over the past year, modernising the British Baroque composer’s take on Roman poet Virgil’s tragic tale of love and abandonment.

The drag opera debuted to sold-out audiences at the Singapore International Festival of Arts in May 2024, where it caught the eye of Tomoyuki Arai, curator and programme officer at the Yokohama International Performing Arts Meeting festival. Impressed, Arai invited Ong to bring Dido and Aeneas to Japan that December.

Now, an expanded version of this contemporary revival returns to Singapore as Dido & The Belindas for a two-week run starting tomorrow, with local drag artists, Japanese ballroom performers, and even a classical tenor taking the stage at T:>Works’ Mohamed Sultan headquarters.

Local drag icon Becca D’Bus, award-winning ballroom performers Koppi from the House of Mizrahi and Showta, from the Japan Chapter of House of Nina Oricci, and lyric tenor Thomas Michael Allen are just some of this year’s collaborators.

And while Virgil’s version tells of how Dido, the Queen of Carthage, takes her own life in despair after the Trojan hero Aeneas abandons her, Keng Sen challenges the trope of women as hapless victims of circumstance.

“It’s a very beautiful story, and of course, because it was written about 400 years ago, it has some problematic notions of women. Today, when we look at it, we have to retrieve the story, but also transform it to speak to today’s women. And part of retrieving Dido is looking at what happens after she suicides – after abandonment,” he shares.

This time, Dido returns to share how her suicide was not just about heartbreak, but a way to take control of her own life – a choice that still feels taboo today.

One key narrator of this conversation is a real-life suicide survivor, who will speak about the privilege of grief. “V4LCY’s presence on stage represents two narratives of abandonment,” explains Keng Sen. “One is Dido’s – epic, 3,000 years old. The other is her own – contemporary, Singaporean, everyday.”

Because V4LCY survived, he says, she now has the space to grieve. And for her, that grief has become something worth living for.

In many ways, this becomes Keng Sen’s tribute to Dido’s second coming: a celebration of her as a strong, independent woman who reclaims her own story.

“[Purcell’s] original libretto for Dido says, ‘Remember me. Forget my destiny, but remember me. Forget my life, but remember me.’ And we added, toward the end, a kind of reprise where Becca, our host, says: ‘Forget what the world has told you. Remember who you are. Don’t remember what the world has said about you,’” he says.

Catch Dido & The Belindas during T:>Works’ DnA Fest from 16-19 & 23-26 July, with The Afterparty on 18 and 25 July. More information here.

PHOTOGRAPHY Athirah Annissa
ART DIRECTION Adeline Eng and Ray Ticsay
COORDINATION Chelsia Tan