Much has
been made of how the opening act at the Singapore Arts Festival this
year, The Architecture of Silence by the Slovene National Theatre
Opera & Ballet Maribor and Ljubljana with the Singapore Festival
Orchestra, is an aqua ballet on land: the dancers are togged like swimmers
in one-piece suits and swim caps, frolicking like fish yet having little
contact with water. But this marine theme serves more as a platform
for Romanian-born choreographer Edward Clug to ruminate on life and
death, through the Christian symbolism and "distinctly present
silence" that he links with fish.
At its debut in 2006, this hour-long production saw the opera and ballet
houses of Maribor and Ljubljana in Slovenia joining forces for the first
time. For its Asian premiere here, 45 dancers and 80 singers were backed
by the 66-strong Singapore Festival Orchestra. Despite involving many
personnel, however, Architecture seemed intimate in scale,
framed in the stark lines and walls of Marko Japelj's black pared-down
set.
Instead it drew much of its power from its music, which stitched together
Mozart's Requiem in D Minor, finished a year after his
death in 1791, and Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner's 1955 Requiem
for My Friend. Architecture began with the Mozart, suddenly
halting at the Lacrimosa movement after eight bars, where Mozart had
stopped writing upon his passing, to resume with the Preisner, which
ended with its own Lacrimosa section. A sense of continuity was thus
built into the music, the choreography's main inspiration, reassuring
us that life goes on.
The soloists and opera choir gave emotive voice to the score, the elegiac
mood heightened by Andrej Hajdinjak's lighting design; the faces
of the choir members, who stood above and behind the dancers in four
rows, glowed like votive candles on an altar. This church-like image
was extended to the movable set pieces, boxy sofas that the dancers
pushed together to form pews and mark out other spaces in which to perform.
The action, though, felt enigmatic, riding the ebb and flow of the
music while suggesting a community trying to find its legs in the shifting
terrain of an uncertain world. In the beginning, a duet and several
solos broke away from a ring of dancers facing inwards before they rejoined
the group. A more exuberant section saw the cast vaulting onto the sofa-made
pews, the women cartwheeling off them or running across the length of
them before being lifted by the men into a suspended leap.
At one point, the dancers filed on stage one by one in a line that
snaked from upstage to down, repeating a two-part phrase (raising an
arm, pausing in arabesque) on both sides of the body until they reached
downstage: an episode visualising life's endless cycle, possibly
adapted from the "Kingdom of the Shades" scene in the 19th-century
ballet La Bayadère. Yet, in spite of its moments of
brilliance, the choreography - sharply phrased ballet steps, laced
with fluttering mudra-like gestures - threatened to look the same
after a while. And who was blonde-haired Valentina Turcu, the only dancer
in white? What did she want with the others?
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"This marine theme serves ... as a platform for Romanian-born choreographer
Edward Clug to ruminate on life and death, through the Christian symbolism
and "distinctly present silence" that he links with fish."
Credits
Director and choreographer: Edward Clug
Conductor: Uroš Lajovic
Set designer: Marko Japelj
Costume designer: Leo Kulaš
Lighting designer: Andrej Hajdinjak
Assistant conductor: Marko Hnbernik
Assistant choreographer: Bojana Nenadovic Otrin
Video projections: Agencija 41 (production), Nejc Pohar (direction)
Performers: Dancers and opera choirs of the Slovene National Theatre
Opera and Ballet Maribor and Slovene National Theatre Opera and Ballet
Ljubljana, Singapore Festival Orchestra
Opera soloists of the Slovene National Theatre Opera and Ballet Maribor:
Sabina Cvilak (soprano), Matjaž Stopinšek (tenor), Giovannino
Raffanelli (guest countertenor)
Opera soloists of the Slovene National Theatre Opera and Ballet Ljubljana:
Mirjam Kalin (alto), Zoran Potocan (bass)
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