Karen O stops the virgens

Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontman Karen O has announced details of a ‘psycho-opera’ that she will be staging at the The Creators Project in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighbourhood this October.

Entitled ‘Stop the Virgens’, it will stage from the 12th – 22th October at St. Ann’s Warehouse, in a total of eight performances. ‘Stop the Virgens’ features songs by Karen O with musical direction from YYYs bandmate Nick Zinner and Sam Spiegel. Karen’s longtime fashion consultant Christian Joy holds the flag for costume design. Contributors include members of the Greenhornes/Raconteurs, Money Mark, YYYs drummer Brian Chase, and actress Lili Taylor. That’s some serious casting.

‘Stop the Virgens’ is co-created by Karen O and design director KK Barrett, produced by The Creators Project, and directed by Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp.

In Karen O’s words, her ambitions for the project is:

I have a pretty good idea of what the psycho opera is about but I wouldn’t dare try and put it into my clumsy words. I’m hoping to create an original live experience, it should feel like a psychedelic ride laced with catharsis. There is emotional cost to our narrative so we’re aiming to engage the audience, this piece isn’t aiming to be all about spectacle or abstraction though there is good helping of both in the production. It’s aiming to have all the good stuff of escapist entertainment with a few sucker punches to the gut along the way. I’m in the camp that needs to discover and take risks, sometimes it’s with the promise of something special and new, sometimes it’s to stay awake, either way it’s much more stressful with all the uncertainty but worth the pain in the end.

The Creators Project’s New York event will take place at Brooklyn’s DUMBO from 13th-16th October, 2011