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Wagner Society in NSW Inc
I hope you saw the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Berlioz’ somewhat unwieldy stage work – preferably at the Met, but at least at the High Definition broadcasts at one of the Sydney cinemas. If you did, then I suspect you will have had a foretaste of the barrage of high tech computer and audio-visual effects brought to bear by Lepage to bring the highly episodic work to life. If you didn’t see the production, then you missed a visual feast, but you can get a taste with a short video on the Met’s website (www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/season/production.aspx?id=9929&detect=yes). In response to a request to describe his visual approach to the opera, Lepage replied: ‘I was interested to find a meeting point between the theatricality of opera and the cinematic world, to create a kind of portal where those two ways of telling stories would come together. So we created a kind of double wall that looks a bit like scaffolding at times. We have performers within that wall and we have projections coming from the back and from the front, so the three-dimensional, real-life performers are caught in a sandwich of cinematic realities. At first the singers were a bit afraid of it, but then they found that it’s a very friendly environment for their voices–we’re blocking the proscenium arch with this huge mirrored wall, so the voice actually bounces back into the room.’ In response to a specific question about his plans for The Ring Cycle, Lepage said: ‘La Damnation de Faust is an opportunity for us to set the basis of the visual language and the technologies and interactive technologies that are going to be used in the Ring. The real goal is to try to push that language far enough so that we create one of the most spectacular Ring cycles.’ As Antony Tommasini said in his review (Between Hell and Heaven, a World of Morphing Imagery of November 9, 2008): ‘The imposing, four-tiered wall of Carl Fillion’s set is subdivided into 24 cubicles. When individual screens drop into place, the set becomes a continuous surface, like some supersize flat-screen television, on which enormous images can be projected.’ All of the scenes used the cubicles that could function as small rooms, walkways or screens in a dizzying number of ways. Sometimes the screens showed a setting with, for example a flock of birds wheeling across the huge display or a forest dying by stages as Mephistopheles walks through it. The production also used a very large chorus and troops of extras (literally when the extras became the soldiers leaving for the battle with the Hungarians during the famous Rakovsky March. During the Dance of the Sylphs, each of the dancers danced within one of the cubicles onto which was projected curtaining whose movements were controlled by the dancer herself through infra-red sensors that fed her movements into a computer that then changed the movement of the curtains as if she had moved this way then that – very convincing and much easier than having to install and remove 24 sets of real curtains for the ballet. I forgot to mention that during this scene there are Spiderman-like flying around the set and acrobats climbing up the front of the wall of screens, and there’s more: ‘red-coated demonic lizards crawl about on the surface of it, defying gravity, and soldiers march from stage bottom to top, perpendicular to the wall, before falling, wounded, three stories, into the arms of lamenting sweethearts’ (John Yohalem at www.operatoday.com/content/2008/11/la_damnation_de.php). Another review usefully summarises some of the other effects: Lepage accompanies swiftly changing scenery with computer animated projections, people walk up the wall, or magically fly through the air on invisible ropes. The travelogue becomes a dream journey whose ever-changing pictures support the flow of the music. The interaction between actors and stage techniques reaches its poetic peak in the Elbe scene. The actors, simultaneously filmed, and with their images projected on the lower half of the set, appear reflected on the water, gently distorted by waves. (Rosemarie Fruehauf & Nadia Ghattas in the Epoch Time review at http://en.epochtimes.com/n2/content/view/7301/). In one of the most striking images in the production, as Tommasini describes: ‘When Mephistopheles, the bass-baritone John Relyea, tempts Faust, now transformed into a young man, with the prospect of the love of a young woman, Marguerite, he rows Faust across a placid lake. Suddenly Mephistopheles capsizes the boat, and Faust appears to sink into a swirling pool, where he has an underwater dance with a nymphlike creature.’ The swirling pool is in fact a projection onto the wall of the 24 screens that form the set’s backdrop. It immediately brought back memories for me of the Bill Viola images for Tristan und Isolde that came to Sydney last year (and reviewed by Katie French - you can read her comments on the Society’s webpage at www.wagner-nsw.org.au/reviews/r08/r0804_lovedeath.html). See a summary of the Editor’s views on Viola’s Tristan Project. It was very easy to imagine the ‘swirling pool’ in Faust being re-worked by Lepage into the opening scene of Das Rheingold. Tommasini wonders about Marguerite’s scene ‘D’amour, l’ardente flamme,’ in Part 4, ‘when this tragic young woman, awaiting execution in prison, still pines with love for Faust. Ms. Graham’s face is reflected in an enormous close-up video image, engulfed in smoke and flame. Could this be a hint of what Mr. Lepage has in mind for Brunnhilde’s Immolation Scene, when in 2010-11 he stages the Met’s new production of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle?’ You might have also sampled Mr Lepage’s work in the nine hour Lypsynch beingperformed in the 2009 Sydney Festival, although it did not show the same level of audio-visual and computer-generated graphics as the Damnation. [Editor]
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