Janice Kerbel was nominated for the 2015 Turner Prize for her performance piece DOUG. This operatic work takes the fictional character through nine imagined catastrophes. The character originally debuted in the form of a blog and is typical of Kerbel’s use of conventional modes of narrative in order to craft elaborate, fictional forms, or as she puts it to ‘see if there’s a way to inhabit some kind of existing language’.
Kerbel's precisely constructed works often take the form of audio recordings, performance and printed matter. DOUG is an operatic piece comprising of nine songs for six voices. Song titles include ‘Fall’ ‘Choke’ ‘Crash’ ‘Strike’ and ‘Sink’. Voice, rhythmic verse and the structures inherent in music are used to give shape to the disastrous events that befall him.
