Scenic Design

FIST

An Opera and performance by Johanna Hedva

Directed by George R. Miller

Touring 2025-2026

For their new theatrical work, Johanna Hedva performs songs from the forthcoming, unreleased album Fist. The piece marks their debut collaboration with opera director George R. Miller, who stages what might be the afterlife—eerie, void-like. White feathers, black goo. A mattress turned upside down. Written on a haunted acoustic guitar that disappeared for ten years and then returned overnight, the songs from Fist conjure “dominatrix blues,” “bog-witch lullabies,” and “succubus folk.” Hedva’s trademark voice, trained in opera and Korean P'ansori, slides between croaks, growls, and ecstatic cries as it slouches toward a cathartic purge. The songs hold doomed lament, dismembered body parts, murderous rage, and, of course, ordinary swampy heartbreak with men on their knees. Desire is ruinous—it has ruined everything.