William Kentridge’s Refuse
the Hour
Brooklyn Academy of Music
(BAM)
October 23, 2015
Alban Berg’s Lulu
Metropolitan Opera
November 14, 2015
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| The professor is in. William Kentridge holds forth in Refuse the Hour Photo Credit: BAM |
William Kentridge is not
only a monster of energy; he is an inexhaustible fount of ideas. Refuse
the Hour, his experimental opera for spoken voice that was featured in
this year’s Next Wave Festival at BAM, is so bursting with ideas that it was
almost difficult to keep up with its highly conceptual barrage of visual
inventiveness and playful intelligence. The dynamic production starred the
artist himself reading a text that at times waxed poetic, at others told a
story, other times preached, others still lectured, and featured dancers,
singers, actors, mimes, an unconventionally orchestrated live band as well as a
number of other Duchamp-inspired contraptions, including an automaton
mechanized percussion section that dangled decoratively from the ceiling. Not
to mention the ever-changing projections that were full of familiar Kentridge
touches.
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| Language and its vicissitudes take center stage. Photo Credit: BAM |
Onto three proscenium-sized screens were projected a visual collage of
video, drawings, charcoal sketches and animations. The projections employed his
signature charcoal sketches and animations predominantly drawn onto pages from
a dictionary. And here the dictionary trope was very tightly thematically
linked to the work as a whole. Many of the vignettes were about language. One
particularly memorable vignette dramatized the concept of entropy through the
enact of speech acts falling apart, disintegrating over time and then slowly
recomposing themselves through the thought experiment of reversing time.
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| Lulu living in a supersaturated world. Photo Credit: Ken Howard / Met |
Kentridge does something
similar in his production of Alban Berg’s Lulu, which debuted at
the Metropolitan Opera this fall. Dressing her in a boxy canvas-white smock,
she is quite literally a canvas onto which the men around her can project their
desires for a good portion of the show. Like the words in the dictionary pages
or in the entropy vignette in Refuse the Hour, her beauty is
deconstructed, broken down into its constituent parts, quite literally
represented by abstractions of her body parts. Only this time rather than
playing exclusively with language, Kentridge takes up the challenging musical
landscape that Lulu inhabits and seems to in part recast elements of her
feminine charms into the symbols of musical notation. For example, the breast
that she wears pinned onto his canvas-like smock like a tail pinned onto a
donkey at a child’s birthday party is quite simply an inverted fermata sign
borrowed from the musical lexicon.
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| Lulu deconstructed. Photo credit: Ken Howard |
And of course, Berg’s score
is notoriously challenging, for the orchestra and singers as well as for the
audience. There is nothing straightforward about the singspiel-esque
vibe of the whole piece. Unlike Wozzeck, which eschews the limitations
of his mentor Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositional technique, Lulu is
Berg’s great dodecaphonic masterpiece. The development of each of its characters
as well as the sequence in which they appear and disappear in the score is all
determined by charts organized around a predetermined sequence of twelve tones.
Where Berg deconstructs his characters musically, Kentridge deconstructs them
visually though the signs and symbols of the music, at least in certain
details, like the abstraction of his heroine’s body parts.
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| Lulu's charms are irresistible. Photo credit: Ken Howard |
After seeing her in other
video recordings of the opera, Marlis Petersen is on the top of her game
as Lulu. In fact, I can hardly picture her being played by any of the other
world class sopranos that I know. Petersen just has all the right moves. Her
stage presence is magnetic, she embodies the innate Germanness of the
character, she is playful, youthful, sexy, strong and yet vulnerable, out of
control and riding the wave, controlling and yet acting impetuously, nonchalant
and uncaring yet needy, desperate for affirmation, attention, affection, appreciation.
However, I also can't help but thinking at almost every minute she is on stage
that her talent isn't being somehow also at the same time wasted. She sang such
a transcendent Susanna in last year’s gala production of Le nozze di Figaro
that it seems like a shame not to have her embodying musically richer
tapestries of sounds rather than all this cacophony.
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| Like a blank canvas, she's everything you want her to be. Photo credit: Metropolitan Opera |
Who is this Lulu? She is a
broken girl. Only on the verge of womanhood. She is an object of desire. She is
a blank canvas onto which men of all ages, walks of life, shapes, and sizes
project their fantasies. She is a commodity. At one point, she is even traded
like a stock on the stock market. Shares of an entity or publicly traded
company called Jungenfrau (literally Youngwoman in English) are booming in the
beginning of Act III, though the Kentridge production never plays it up the way
other productions do. (Since she isn’t even on stage during the buying and
selling of this hot property, the link between the shares and the physical
person of Lulu is only left abstract.) She is a seductress and a murderess and
a lover and a muse and an infatuation and a sex kitten. But is she really a
femme fatale? Not particularly. When she finds herself making fatal decisions
she hardly does so maliciously of her own volition.
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| Dr. Schön gets worked up. Photo credit: Ken Howard |
Everything falls apart for
her after she loses/murders the only man whom she really loves. Does that make
it some kind of cautionary tale? Violence is not the solution. Like everything
else she does she seems to pull the trigger even innocently. Not aware of the
consequences of such a decisive decision. The same seems to happen with the way
she toys with all the men in her life. Sex is virtually meaningless to her. But
she thrives on all the attention and affection she gets from them, as though
she is still an unformed person, not sure of herself, incapable of loving
herself first. Towards the end Schilogen says that she is trying to make a
living through love, but love is her life. Just minutes later, however, we see
her desperately groping for sustained attention from a father looking or at
least a man old enough to be her father. "Will you come back to see me again," she
says in desperation. Without Dr. Schön she is truly missing the only father
figure, lover, partner, spouse she ever really had. He was her everything.
There was hardly a role he didn’t play for her. Since she never had anyone else
to fill those roles, without him she is truly an empty vessel – the famous
blank canvas onto which men project their desires freely. Lulu herself also
demands to be painted on and projected upon. She can be anything they want
because she is nothing without their desires.
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| An assassin is born. Photo credit: Ken Howard |
At the same time however
Lulu is equally incapable of returning the affection of those who really do
love her. The rejected lesbian countess then ponders suicide. She is in the
throes of the disease she contracted on Lulu’s behalf and is hurt that Lulu
won't ever love her back. “Her heart is cold as ice,” she says but in a hopeful
turn abandons the plan to take her own life and instead resolves to make one
last attempt, one last plea at her heart.
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| Lulu with her precious portraits. Photo credit: Ken Howard |
In a stroke of signature
Kentridge genius, after Jack the Ripper stabs both Lulu and the Countess he
frantically searches for a rag to wipe the blood off his blade. When he finds
nothing better, he picks up one of Lulu’s portraits and wipes her blood off on
it like nothing more than a mere rag. This is the fate of all commodities in
this consumerist world. Art like stocks like all human capital can be worth
millions one moment, reduced to scrap paper the next.
And so perhaps it's a
parable about the commodification of art in the first half of the twentieth
century – an opera about commodification of women who is a musical abstraction
in her own right, set to the music of atonality, which was conceived as a
reaction to the traditional bourgeois commodification of music. Remember the opera
opens with a circus master hawking admission to his spectacle starring a woman
whom he has configured as the most horrific of serpents, a sight you just can't
take your eyes off, a veritable box of Pandora.
Sad but true and Lulu
amounts to little more than this: a beautiful flash in the pan, a scrap of
paper to be taken up and then discarded.
And the world rages on.
– Lui & Lei
