Is it a Bird, is it a Plane?
February 14, 2008 at 10:45 am (The X-Piles, Misc.)
I read somewhere that William Kentridge had said, of his Magic Flute, “In this production (as in all), we ask you to listen to the orchestra, the singers, the spoken text, to watch the singers, to read the surtitles above the stage, and also to watch the projections behind and around all of this. It is clear that this is too much. The best advice I can give is to let your eyes and ears follow as they will, and accept that a part of the production will be missed. This acceptance is better than an anxiety about not taking everything in.”
Well, I thought (without properly attending to what he was saying), I can do that, and after snapping up a ridiculously expensive ticket the moment the box office opened then checking on it every day for five months to make sure it was safe, the big day finally came. I took my seat in a packed theatre, to the singular sound of an orchestra tuning up. That sound is a music all its own, tweee squeee li li dong ding li li li bom li li ooop to the shuffle-hum of an audience that’s trying to settle but keeps dropping the programme down the side of the seat. You can’t put that sound on a CD, same as you can’t bottle the aroma of coffee, or popcorn in a cinema lobby.
Then I sat numb-bummed and bummed-out for the next couple of hours, wondering what was wrong with me. This is awful, I thought, and felt cretinous for thinking it. I furtively checked some other faces for signs of same but they were rapt. I was a lone Neanderthal. I felt dejected, and small, and horribly uncultured. After a while I tried to avoid the subtitles - subtitles on an opera? Yes! And not just lowly subtitles either but surtitles (so it wasn’t a typo like I’d thought), ahem, up top there way above the stage on that screen-thing do you see (“SHHHHH!”)? Oh how clever! But no, how distractingly neck-cricking, and honestly, sometimes it’s better not to understand the words after all. The Magic Flute story itself is quite thin and silly, isn’t it – basically a gilded bus for the music to travel in. I know that’s heresy but still. I’m afraid the whole thing sailed straight over my head like a golden Frisbee with bells and ribbons on. I felt that if I came across Mr Kentridge in the lobby at interval I’d have to avoid him carefully because he’d sense my utter ignorance and he’d be unable to stop himself from smiting me.
Afterwards I thought, Ok I can accept that this isn’t for me, I can get on with life and not lug the trauma around like a pet rock, but I still want to know: Who is it for? Who are those chosen ones who loved it to bits? The answer came some time later in a review I read by Andre Brink, titled “A profound meditation on Kentridge’s multi-dimensional Magic Flute”, of a profound book called Flute, which is profoundly about the production itself.
According to Mr Brink, “Flute should now affirm, persuasively and gloriously, that Kentridge comes closer to the prodigious creativity and the promethean energy of Picasso than any other South African artist.” He said that Mr Kentridge’s treatment of this opera “…reminds one of the epithet terribilita used in the renaissance for the work of Michaelangelo.” He said that the only possible problem there could ever be with this production, albeit a tiny one, could be that local singers aren’t always able to “…match Kentridge’s staggering grasp of visual, spatial and musical experience…” , and then he said some other stuff too. There are grand and complicated things in there, and while reading the review I lapsed into another series of Frisbee moments.
So it’s simple, really - the people who liked the show are the ones who know what it all means, or who don’t mind that it doesn’t mean anything. They are the ones with heads held high enough for the Frisbee to connect with, and who know how to listen carefully to the artist’s advice and then actually apply it. I am very happy for them.