Being affiliated with a major university -- and knowing the right people who point you to cool events -- has its advantages.
Yesterday I attended the Ohio State Theatre Research Institute lecture featuring Pamela Howard. This woman -- a "director, scenographer, visual theatre artist and educator" -- was amazingly smart, thoughtful, funny, generous, intelligent, talented. What can I say -- I was honored to be in her presence.
Many people were there to find out about her current work-in-progress, a production based on Charlotte Salomon's graphic memoirs Life? or Theatre? If you haven't heard of her, Charlotte Salomon was a 23-year-old Jewish refugee sheltering with her grandparents in Vichy France in 1940 when she learned of a strange fate that surely awaited her -- she learned that eight members of her family in the matrilineal line had committed suicide, a fact that had been hidden from her when her mother threw herself out a window in 1926 and only came to light when her grandmother killed herself in spring 1940. She saw two options: "to take her own life or to undertake something eccentric and mad." That undertaking was a series of 1200 watercolors about her family. And while her art did not save her in the end -- she was transported to Auschwitz in 1943 and killed upon arrival -- it did survive her in almost epic ways.
Charlotte's life has been staged numerous times, often with the use of her own drawings to illustrate it, but Pamela argues that these attempts have all failed (and she's not the only one to think so). The life itself -- and its auto-illustrations -- are so compelling that somehow the only thing to do is to project those images on the screen and play in front of them. Pamela has another idea, and she is staging the life (along with a Czech composer and a Canadian librettist) as a completely different kind of opera, an opera of simultaneity, of shifting space and time, of characters passing to the other side and seeing their fate through a translucent screen as they play out their scenes.
What Howard talks about is making a speaking space, "working out how to tell a story with space, text and vision." This is that "total creation" that sometimes seems ominous (as in Gesamkunstwerk) but in Pamela's rendition seems clean, lucid, open. Over the course of the lecture she talked about how her drawings function as a framework for the visual performance she is creating, as "something concrete" to work from. Some people think in words. She thinks in words, images and space.
One of her reviewers has talked about a "found object" aesthetic, particularly in the Brno, Czech Republic production that interests me -- a rendition originally performed in 2009 of a 1953 opera written for NBC television by New York Czech refugee Bohuslav Martinu which used the plot of Nikolai Gogol's 1842 play The Marriage.
Whew. If Martinu -- living in penury at the time in NYC -- set his two act comic opera in 1840s St. Petersburg, Howard set hers in post-war 1953 New York, with the aging, despairing, and dissolute Russian emigres who had fled the Revolution and World War II as her characters, the "suitors" in the marriage business.
There are so many interesting places to go with this, I can't even get started today. Most importantly, though, in her personal appearance, in her lecture, Pamela Howard talked about deliberately limiting herself to see how much she can do, of creating a "rich theatre out of little means," of creativity in defiance of tyranny. This is akin to what Alexander Pushkin did with his novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin in 1823-1830: he created a set of limitations and then went wild within those strictures. Tsarist Russia, especially after 1825. Nazi Germany. Vichy France. Post-Soviet Ukraine. Creativity in defiance of tyranny.
Those last words pay homage to Charlotte Salomon and to many victims like her across the world, who make beauty in spite of world events and regardless of how those events incur into their own personal space, their own lives.
Yesterday I attended the Ohio State Theatre Research Institute lecture featuring Pamela Howard. This woman -- a "director, scenographer, visual theatre artist and educator" -- was amazingly smart, thoughtful, funny, generous, intelligent, talented. What can I say -- I was honored to be in her presence.
Many people were there to find out about her current work-in-progress, a production based on Charlotte Salomon's graphic memoirs Life? or Theatre? If you haven't heard of her, Charlotte Salomon was a 23-year-old Jewish refugee sheltering with her grandparents in Vichy France in 1940 when she learned of a strange fate that surely awaited her -- she learned that eight members of her family in the matrilineal line had committed suicide, a fact that had been hidden from her when her mother threw herself out a window in 1926 and only came to light when her grandmother killed herself in spring 1940. She saw two options: "to take her own life or to undertake something eccentric and mad." That undertaking was a series of 1200 watercolors about her family. And while her art did not save her in the end -- she was transported to Auschwitz in 1943 and killed upon arrival -- it did survive her in almost epic ways.Charlotte's life has been staged numerous times, often with the use of her own drawings to illustrate it, but Pamela argues that these attempts have all failed (and she's not the only one to think so). The life itself -- and its auto-illustrations -- are so compelling that somehow the only thing to do is to project those images on the screen and play in front of them. Pamela has another idea, and she is staging the life (along with a Czech composer and a Canadian librettist) as a completely different kind of opera, an opera of simultaneity, of shifting space and time, of characters passing to the other side and seeing their fate through a translucent screen as they play out their scenes.
What Howard talks about is making a speaking space, "working out how to tell a story with space, text and vision." This is that "total creation" that sometimes seems ominous (as in Gesamkunstwerk) but in Pamela's rendition seems clean, lucid, open. Over the course of the lecture she talked about how her drawings function as a framework for the visual performance she is creating, as "something concrete" to work from. Some people think in words. She thinks in words, images and space.
 |
| Poster for Pamela Howard's production of Zenitba in Brno |
Whew. If Martinu -- living in penury at the time in NYC -- set his two act comic opera in 1840s St. Petersburg, Howard set hers in post-war 1953 New York, with the aging, despairing, and dissolute Russian emigres who had fled the Revolution and World War II as her characters, the "suitors" in the marriage business.
There are so many interesting places to go with this, I can't even get started today. Most importantly, though, in her personal appearance, in her lecture, Pamela Howard talked about deliberately limiting herself to see how much she can do, of creating a "rich theatre out of little means," of creativity in defiance of tyranny. This is akin to what Alexander Pushkin did with his novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin in 1823-1830: he created a set of limitations and then went wild within those strictures. Tsarist Russia, especially after 1825. Nazi Germany. Vichy France. Post-Soviet Ukraine. Creativity in defiance of tyranny.
Those last words pay homage to Charlotte Salomon and to many victims like her across the world, who make beauty in spite of world events and regardless of how those events incur into their own personal space, their own lives.
Comments
Post a Comment