Young girls who presented to hospital literally choking from the horror of September 11 have been given voice in a startling Australian production

Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, five emaciated teenage girls turned up independently at a hospital in Manhattan. Each was suffering from identical symptoms. They could not eat, they said, because their oesophagus was blocked: flesh from the victims, and debris from the Twin Towers, had become lodged in their mouths.

“The ear, nose, and throat surgeon who examined the girls discovered that their throats were, indeed, constricted,” writes journalist Susan Faludi in her 2007 book The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. “But he could find no obstruction, no debris, and, needless to say, no body parts.”

This real-life medical anecdote has since been repeated and re-fangled as an allegory for the impossibility of articulating the horrors of September 11 – and is now the inspiration for a new Australian opera.

The Howling Girls, by composer Damien Ricketson and director Adena Jacobs, premieres on Wednesday night at Carriageworks in Sydney. Featuring soprano Jane Sheldon and six teenage girls, the opera is, above all, an interrogation of the voice.

Play Video 3:03 Splutters, pants, hacks and rasps: the new Australian opera that experiments with voice – video

Ricketson and Jacobs, working with Sydney Chamber Opera, had explored a number of tales including The Little Mermaid, who sacrifices the power of speech for love, and the drowning of Ophelia, before settling on The Howling Girls. “The thing we realised they all had in common was what it means to have a voice; what it means to have your voice constricted; and what it means to re-find your voice,” says Ricketson.

In a recent preview of the performance, Sheldon stands on a bare stage that emulates a tomb. Wearing an eerie transparent shroud-like gown, her arms pinned to her side, she splutters, pants, hacks and rasps. In the silence between, there is the roll of a drum. Then the chorus of girls – in furry black gowns, a gaggle of prehistoric birds – use Aztec death whistles to shriek in unison. The scene is deeply distressing and yet strangely addictive.

The Howling Girls, an abstract opera that aims to create an otherworldly altered state, bristles with primal sounds. There are also fractures of language so distant they are barely comprehensible. “It’s an attempt to remake or reconstitute the voice after a trauma. Is that even possible?” asks Jacobs, clutching her own neck as she talks.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jane Sheldon performs a 36-minute wail of anguish in The Howling Girls. Photograph: Zan Wimberley

As Faludi writes in The Terror Dream, the story of the choking girls (first reported in a book by literary professor Judith Greenberg) suggested “an inability to digest the catastrophe”. Which begs the question: are the girls “a metaphor for our failure to ‘swallow’ the experience of 9/11 – or for our inability to express it?”



Female bodies are “always on the front line, the first place in which politics plays out and where society tries to reinstate control,” insists Faludi, speaking to The Guardian on the phone from her home in Massachusetts. (Although The Howling Girls was in part a response to The Terror Dream, Faludi has not been involved in the development of the production.)

Female voices were silenced post-9/11, Faludi argues in her book: from a 40% drop in women appearing on Sunday talk shows to the censure of feminist figures like Susan Sontag who, after speaking out against the official Bush administration narrative, were “verbally drawn and quartered in the public square”.

“What raced into that space were chest beating op-eds by conservative to right-wing men saying this all shows we need to go back to John Wayne America,” she says. “There was this weird impulse to have traditional cowboy-like heroes and to redefine the victims as women. It was very hyper masculine.”

The Howling Girls uses the choking girls to explore the phenomenon of “mass hysteria”. In the Victorian era, explains Faludi, hysteria was a “mute protest – an inability to say, ‘Hey I don’t fit the picture of this culture and it is actually doing me psychological and physical damage’. And so in that way you can see these girls after 9/11 being emblematic of the sense that something that is deeply wrong with how we are dealing with this crisis. But not having the words, so enacting it on our bodies.”

Jacobs, who directed the opera, agrees: “Certainly, the seed of the work relates to a question of the female voice and hysteria as a kind of mode of communication which is beyond language.”



The concept of “hysteria” has historically been a way to regulate or dismiss the behaviour of women. But Jacobs is also interested in an argument within feminist theory that hysteria can be “repurposed as a very subversive force outside the regular masculine mode of language”.

To that affect, The Howling Girls is a wordless opera (it has no libretto). Built on a mainly electronic score, it has no narrative and no sense of place, beyond that of a ghostly burial chamber where voices rise and gurgle through the vault. Instead of lyrics, the music itself functions as a means of expression, creating an aura of ritual, of panic, of anxiety and of fragmentation.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in a 36-minute endurance piece Sheldon performs: the noises she emits – wailing, moaning, howling – mimic those made by human beings in times of uncontrollable anguish.



Critically, much of the score has been developed to bypass the brain, instead creating a near-violent corporeal impact on those listening. To do that, the opera features low tones and frequencies that are felt as vibrations first and heard second. Ricketson, the composer, notes: “It’s very visceral.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The sparse, tomb-like set of The Howling Girls. Photograph: Zan Wimberley

Abuse of the body – represented by the choking girls but also, artistically, by the dogged stamina Sheldon must show in her performance, and by the spectators, who must tolerate a profoundly uncomfortable experience – is one way “to form a kind of inarticulate protest”, says Faludi.

And yet The Howling Girls arrives at a time that many hope will be a new era forged by the #metoo movement. Significantly, it opens just a few days after porn star Stormy Daniels spoke on 60 Minutes about her alleged affair with Donald Trump, despite attempts to shut her down (and shut her up).

The Howling Girls may be a wordless opera. But it is by no means silent. It is telling that it has emerged as women are finally beginning to talk, in whatever means they have.

Women “are getting tired of being the recipients of the country’s illnesses”, says Faludi. They are saying, “I kept quiet. No longer.”



• The Howling Girls is on at Carriageworks in Sydney until 7 April