Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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by Neema Bickersteth, Kate Alton & Ross Manson, directed by Ross Manson
Volcano, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Ave., Toronto
April 19-29, 2017
“A Dazzling Journey Through Time”
Volcano’s dazzling multimedia performance work, Century Song, presented by Nightwood Theatre, is essentially an art song recital enhanced with costumes, choreography, video projections and animation and electronic sound manipulation. All the art songs chosen happen to be wordless which immediately gives them an air of timelessness. Yet, the changes of costume and of the the artworks used in the projections embody very specific times in the twentieth century. While the work’s focus is specifically the progress of Canadian black women through the century, the piece is constructed as a mediation of what is time-bound versus timeless in all of us as we move through life.
The piece makes this point even before it begins with the projection design of Torge Møller and Momme Hinrichs of the German company fettFilm. On the huge square back wall of Camellia Koo’s minimalist set, we see one black-and-white image of a face fade into another. The faces are of people of all races, male and female, young and old, in traditional local apparel or in modern dress. The dissolves from one photo to the next suggests that the huge range of people all share a common humanity that is more important that the variations of skin colour, clothing, sex or age.
The images cycle ever more quickly until they stop with an image of Neema Bickersteth, soprano and co-creator of the piece, and she steps forward. As she sings Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise from 1915, she doff an overcoat to reveal herself in the costume of a humble housewife from the early part of the previous century. As she sings she performs Kate’s Alton’s choreography that seems to show the woman trying to escape from the constraints she is in.
The jerky movements of discomfort are replaced by a swaying of hips that becomes a dance of pleasure. Bickersteth casts away the apron, the shirtwaist dress and undoes the corset that literally had confined her. As the piece moves from a projection of a simple interior to the Cubist paintings of Canadian Kathleen Munn (1887-1974), Bickersteth appears in an elegant 1930’s era gown in a luxe projected Art Deco interior as she sings the Vocalise étude by Olivier Messiaen from 1935.
During an interlude, Bickersteth exits to be dressed with another set of layered costumes while we watch projections of Expressionist woodcuts by the great German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1891-1945), who so well captured the fear and suffering of the lower classes. Bickersteth re-enters dressed in overalls and a headscarf, a quintessential “Rosie the Riveter”, one of the many women who worked in factories while men were fighting in World War II. For her song by Messiaen, Vocalise pour l’Ange qui announce la fin du Temps from 1941, Bickersteth does not move, as if the horrific period paralyzed movement.
Eventually we move into the late 1940s and the 1950s with projections of Marcel Barbeau’s painting Rosiers feuilles from 1946 and John Cage’s typically bizarre song “a Flower” from 1950 accompanied by pianist Gregory Oh who plays the keyboard cover of his piano as a percussion instrument.
Bickersteth’s longest absence from the stage is filled with a comic video by fettFilm called The Hallway of Progress. Here we move from the 1950s through the ‘60s to the 70s. The video begins with Bickersteth reading a book, then shows her as a typical ‘50s housewife adjusting the rabbit ears on her clunky television set, to a pantsuited Afro-sporting Bickersteth grooving to a record on the hi-fi until we come to a gym-obsessed Bickersteth on a stationary bike and finally have a cool Bickersteth reading a book. At the end all seven images of Bickersteth walk to the front of the screen to face us in a line.
This leads to the comic Récitation pour voix seule No. 10 from 1978 by the Greek composer George Aperghis (b. 1945) while behind Bickersteth are projections, not unlike those before the show, except now in colour, all headshots of Bickersteth dressed in garb, male and female from all places and periods of time. What is troubling is that the jerky movements in Alton’s choreography have returned. Does this mean that women have broken through one set of constraints only to find themselves at the end of the century in another set of constraints?
To carry us from the 1980s into the 2000s is another fettFilm video called Endless City in which we seem to be flying through a Manhattan-like series of skyscrapers except that the same sequence of towers keeps reappearing as if in a loop. Bickersteth’s final song is from 2014, Vocalise for Neema by Canadian Reza Jacobs, the only song that Bickersteth sings using a microphone.
Century Song is an extraordinary showcase for Bickersteth’s talent. Her rich, creamy soprano is equally at home in Rachmaninoff’s lush Vocalise as it is in the more unusual sound-making requirements of the more modern composers. Her ability to maintain breath control while executing Alton’s often quite energetic choreography is remarkable.
Pianist Gregory Oh and percussionist Ben Grossman not only provide ideal accompaniment but create exciting improvised avant garde interludes to serve as transitions between periods. The section that most people will likely find the funniest is the The Hallway of Progress section where Oh and Grossman play a medley of old-time television theme songs.
Charlotte Dean’s choice of period costumes and Rebecca Picherack’s wide range of lighting, blend perfectly with the intensity of light and colour in the video projections.
Though the piece is inspired by Virginia Woolf’s time-travelling novel Orlando (1928) and by Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), an educated viewer would never know so without reading the Message from the Creative Team in the programme. What we experience is the fortitude of women expressed through Bickersteth’s voice that shines through whatever the style of music she sings or whatever the style of garb she wears. Time brings advancements and retrenchments, the 1950s housewife looking like a throwback to the 1910s, but the woman’s voice carries on despite these changes.
It is too bad that we last hear Bickersteth’s voice amplified in Jacobs’s piece when it has been such a pleasure to hear her unamplified to that point. It is also curious that the piece skips through the last three decades so rapidly, though perhaps it is still too early to have a perspective on what the 1980s through the 2000s mean to womankind other than the intrusion of technology into everyday life. Nevertheless, Century Song is a great achievement, a kind of theatre piece as art installation, beautiful to watch and hear but requiring mindful contemplation to understand what it represents. Ideally, viewers, whether male of female, will leave the show with increased awareness of what is and is not essential about living our lives and contributing to human progress – and will focus their energies on the essential.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Neema Bickersteth in Century Song. ©2016 John Lauener.
For tickets, visit http://crowstheatre.com.
2017-04-25
Century Song