Elsewhere
Elsewhere
✭✭✭✩✩
by Beat Furrer, directed by Michael Simon
Theater Aachen
October 14, 18, 21, 25, 27, November 4, 19 & 26, 2000
In Aachen I went to see a performance of the opera DIE BLINDEN by Austrian
composer Beat Furrer in a production by Michael Simon. Though written in
1987, this is the line of the old-style avant-garde anti-operas that assume
a rather high level of intellectual sophistication in the audience. The
libretto for the opera is a German translation of Maeterlinck’s play “Les
Aveugles” interleaved with sections of Plato’s “Parable of the Cave” sung in
Greek. The relation of orchestra to stage is completely reversed. The
orchestra and singers are placed behind a scrim on the stage while a kind if
stage is made by covering over the orchestra pit. From this surface rise a
rotating movie screen on one pillar and a video monitor on another.
As the 90-minute opera progresses, a specially-commissioned film portrays a woman waking up and gradually preparing herself to go out into the everyday world of Aachen. The film begins, intentionally, extremely out-of-focus but
gradually comes into sharper focus as the woman’s mind clears. The video
monitor displays images that comment on those in the film. At the close of
the work, the film and video go off as a woman in red sings a passage from
Rimbaud in French from the balcony of the house. Just before she finishes a
little girl in red appears on the “stage” over the pit and the opera ends.
As the texts of Maeterlinck and Plato suggest, this is a work about our
perception of the world. After the doubts posed by the two main texts, the
conclusion suggests that the metaphor that best represents our relation to
the world is the theatre. Asking the good, aged burghers of Aachen to spend
a nice Sunday afternoon contemplating the nature of representation instead
of dying French courtesans or amorous aristocrats in disguise was obviously
a bit much. More than half of the audience did not even bother to applaud.
Yet, from the conversations I overheard of those under 30, the work was an
exciting experience. Personally, I haven’t been able to get the piece out
of my mind.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in the TheatreWorld (UK) 2002-12-31.
Photo: Scene from Die Blinden. ©2002 Frank Heller.
2000-12-31
Aachen, GER: Die Blinden