What does it mean to choreograph an aria, to add or substitute physical gesture for pre-existing vocal expression? As far as theatrical renovations go, the idea may at first seem absurd – as absurd, perhaps, as Opera on Ice (invented by Italian businesswoman Giulia Mancini) or swimming-pool Shakespeare (the brainchild of Peter Sellars).Footnote 1 I exaggerate but a little. Historically, the role of dance in opera has been incidental, ballet divertissements contributing to the brilliance of a spectacle or the couleur locale of a scene, offering relief from dramatic complexities whilst signalling sex-en-pointe to the male voyeur.Footnote 2 Neither male nor voyeur, I tend to think of these divertissements as operatic prosthetics, artificial appendages designed to fit, improve function, enhance cosmetic appearance and engineer an ideal sense of ‘wholeness’. I also think of carpet, the decorative kind. As art critic and historian Ernst Gombrich has suggested in his magisterial volume on decorative art, the look of carpet is not unlike that of the conventional danced divertissement.Footnote 3 Ornamental, schematic, non-figurative: both are characterised by all-over repetition and a seemingly two-dimensional, space-drained surface.Footnote 4 Both, moreover, share the same visual ontology – they are best described as patterns not pictures, designs not signs, graphic marks not meaningful symbols.Footnote 5 The last is the nub of the issue. The aria is meaning writ large, unashamedly semiotic, representational and loaded with expressive significance. In contrast to the divertissement with its conventional diegeticism and cool exterior, the aria is a hothouse of emotion, a private, custom-made cocoon that rips holes in operatic space-time.
In recent years, the interrelation of the two – choreography and opera, more broadly – has attracted increasing attention: musicologists and theatre historians, not to mention creative practitioners, have begun to explore ways in which the performing body might simultaneously engage both voice and physical gesture. Inspired by a ballooning scholarly literature, I aim here to say a few words about a little-known theatrical production by the young German choreographer-performer-filmmaker Antonia Baehr.Footnote 6 Titled Holding Hands (premiered in Berlin in 2001), in reference to the fixed posture of the solo male and female performers, Baehr’s production features a 1958 recording of Giuseppe Verdi’s aria ‘Tu che le vanità’ from Don Carlo, sung in concert by a 34-year-old Maria Callas.Footnote 7 In the discussion that follows, I offer a straightforward synopsis along with a brief and entirely subjective commentary on a filmed live studio performance.Footnote 8 I’m interested, principally, in what Baehr ‘does’ to Verdi’s number – to its expressive quality, its performance by Callas and its technological mummification in sound.Footnote 9
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There’s not much of Don Carlo – or, for that matter, of Grand Opera – about the visual scene. The stage is a studio floor, empty of scenery and furniture, and drained of colour: the backcloth and walls are white, the lighting neon and clinical. Standing side-by-side centre stage, staring into the audience, are the handholding performers, a couple who cut contrasting figures in dark, unisex clothes. Stationary from the neck down, the two execute slow, deliberate and carefully coordinated movements: they tilt their heads, rotate their necks, raise and lower the corners of their mouths, and shift their eyeballs from side to side, and up and down.
What’s going on here? The intrinsic flatness and abstraction of the visual field might recall the carpet paradigm mentioned above – yet the couple’s movements lack that repetitious quality, the ordered regularity and predictability of a patterned design. Perhaps the choreography could be described as an exercise in endurance, and not only for the performers. Baehr recounts a feeling of uncertainty amongst spectators: they observe movements – movements, to Baehr, that encode emotions – but cannot explain their cause in the absence of any dramatic impetus or narrative logic.Footnote 10 I sense an additional reason for the unease. Watching a piece of choreographed theatre, not to mention one in which (to quote Baehr) ‘almost nothing seems to happen’, spectators might expect to hear music: music to provide a sense of timing, pacing and structure, if not to intimate character, action or mood.Footnote 11 Baehr subverts this expectation, staging the absence of music – over twenty-one minutes of silence. For me at least, it is this silence – combined with the lack of dramatic impulse – that unnerves, that makes the couple’s miniature movements harder to fathom. It is this silence, too, that destabilises my subject-position as spectator, not only denying me the usual musical-dramatic crutch, but also signalling – by its absence – the non-naturalistic nature of the customary musical score.Footnote 12
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If the first section of the production stages the absence of music, the second stages its presence. As the music commences, the performers continue their facial and cranial motions; but now they appear to delight in Verdi’s orchestral lyricism, their swaying heads and shutting eyes like those of regular listeners. This musical presence, in fact, is accentuated twice in advance. Before the recording begins, we hear creaking floorboards: the male bends down – the one and only full-body movement in the production – and presses a button on a small, portable CD player lying on the floor. A few seconds later, we hear clapping, sustained for just under a minute: the performers smile broadly, bow their heads and look to the sides of the stage, as if acknowledging the applause.
The combined effect of these goings-on might be described, in film-theoretical terms, as a strange kind of ‘de-acousmatisation’: the visualisation of music previously ‘present-as-absented’.Footnote 13 Certainly, the goings-on result in a sense of rupture: the audio-visual dynamic shifts as we encounter music for the first time – more precisely, music as visual source, a concrete, tangible presence, a manufactured entity of the kind absent yet alluded to in the previous section. And, of course, we hear music too, the dynamic shifting again as the CD player finds its sonorous supplement, a gushy, overripe, tantalising musical discourse that imprints itself on two faces, heads and necks. From a historical perspective, it is tempting to think of Richard Wagner and his efforts to conceal the orchestra, to ‘suspend disbelief’ in the operatic spectacle. Baehr attempts the opposite. Shattering the illusion of so-called ‘total’ theatre, she exposes music’s material aspect, its existence as a thing on the floor.Footnote 14
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This third and final section shatters another illusion, one that virtually all theatrical productions (not to mention films and TV programmes) strive to maintain: that of the centred subject, the all-singing, all-dancing body. As Callas’s voice resonates around the studio, the two performers pretend to sing: remaining mute throughout, they mouth the words of Verdi’s aria, mostly in unison and always in time.
Shift number three. The performers’ lip-synching – exaggerated in the film by close-up camera-work – effects an instantaneous audio-visual transformation. But let’s recall: the aria here has been cut from its original operatic context, pasted – with considerable pomp (the clapping) and ceremony (the downward bend and button- pressing) – onto a new theatrical scene. Conceptually, like the combined gestures of the opening section, the aria is a standalone entity, independent and autonomous, and lacking any solid dramatic foundation. The recording – Callas in concert – effects the same cut and paste: also divesting the aria of its dramatic salience, it positions the music as a vehicle for showcasing the singer, her vocal tone, technique and expressive rhetoric. Or does it? The synchronisation of moving mouths and singer’s syllables courts ridicule, making the aria seem hare-brained and Callas’s voice (its much-vaunted ‘honesty’ and ‘sincerity’) sound fake. Baehr’s choreography, I suggest, turns Verdi’s number into a prosthetic – to repeat, an artificial appendage designed to fit, improve function, enhance cosmetic appearance and engineer an ideal sense of ‘wholeness’. It might even have something of the decorative carpet about it, the ‘look’ of the aria reduced to the non-representational patterning of repetitive mouth formations.
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My sense is that, while bringing to attention these audio-visual shifts and ontological switches, Holding Hands can be ‘read’ for another layer of significance, one that the terms of the above account appear to signal. The production, I think, has something didactic about it, something to do with disciplinary matters, perceptual orientations, modes of thought and meaning-constitution. In the first section, for example, the spectator’s frustrated interpretative efforts might gesture towards the radical and pervasive scepticism of the hermeneutic approach that has characterised the arts and humanities over the last few decades.Footnote 15 Rewinding to my beginning, we might indeed call this section absurd: absurd in the context of the Theatre of the Absurd, the short-lived historical phenomenon characterised not by the ridiculous or the outrageously comic, but by the senseless, useless, hopeless, meaningless – by depressive depictions of the redundancy of human action and feeling, and, I would add, the redundancy of our long-dominant interpretational habit.Footnote 16 The second section appears to respond to this crisis in critical thought, staging the phenomenological turn in the visual arts, dance and film studies, cultural history and musicology (amongst others). Exposing music’s material presence and sensory effect on listeners, Holding Hands brings to attention various leitmotifs within the post-structuralist intellectual tradition, ones that musicologists of all stripes remain keen to pursue: corporeality, immanence, embodiment, matter, thing theory, the sensorium, the performative, ‘being-in-the-world’.Footnote 17 Section three problematises these increasingly clichéd concepts, shifting the spectator’s awareness from ‘materialities of communication’ (to quote the title of an important volume) to what might be called ‘the artifice of presentation’.Footnote 18 From my point of view, it is irresistible to see the lip-synching episode as a technological simulation, one that, marked by an electronic sense of presence, opens up a virtual world of intertextual connections. In this world, the onstage performers – the stationary pair – are like cyborgs, humans-cum-machines that physically interface with an electronic network while remaining clones of one another, solid and tangible in form. The offstage performer – Callas – is the invisible electronic interface: like HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey, it/she exists only in virtual form, its/her singing voice mechanised and drained of subjectivity. Cyborgs, virtual reality, Kubrick, clones: the terms of this description resonate across recent research on the penetration of the human by the machine, of culture by technology; indeed, there is a growing literature that aims to conceptualise the limits of so-called ‘liberal humanist subjectivity’, a literature alongside which Baehr’s production might productively be analysed.Footnote 19 I think also of a cluster of not-quite-academic studies that examines contemporary Western society and its so-called ‘flight into illusion’, into a fabricated and essentially theatrical world in which humans are both audiences and performance artists, desperately pretending to be the celebrities they adore, desperately desiring to be seen.Footnote 20 And heard, maybe. Baehr’s production – with its handholding clones impersonating opera’s greatest star – might epitomise this contemporary scenario. Staging an offstage culture of illusion, itself an imaginary, virtual, artificial realm, Holding Hands offers a commentary not only on shifting audio-visual dynamics and ontologies of genre. The production casts a glaring light on the perceptual modes and habits of thought that have defined our discipline in its recent history, and the cultural realities to which that discipline continues to respond.
