ALEXANDRIA
Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno
Presented by Vierte Welt, Berlin, 20-23 May 2019.
Soprano: Silvia Micu
Mezzo-soprano: Marie-Gabrielle Arco
Tenor: Gaston Efficace
Tenor/guitar: Glen Sheppard
Cembalo: Tim Rochester
Saxophone: Andrej Lakisov
Glen Sheppard, Concept / Direction / Design
Fritz Polzer, Costume / Dramaturgy / Video
Tamara Heimbrock, Associate Director
Derya Issever and Pina Rederer, Dresses
ALEXANDRIA was an intervention into a very early Handel oratorio, originally subtitled a moral cantata. I reimagined it as an 'immoral' cantata, rejecting the original’s Christian moral resolution in favour of a dramaturgy of dissipation and withdrawal. Into Handel’s score I interpolated songs by Lou Reed, Nico, Arthur Russell and Roxy Music, performed in my own musical adaptations by a small ensemble of cembalo, saxophone and electric guitar.
The project was also an investigation into theatrical time and the construction of a situation. Rather than presenting the oratorio frontally, I created an expansive, melancholic, 'blue' environment somewhere between a gallery, loft and living room. The audience was distributed throughout the space, and the singers performed amidst them. The situation evoked a fragmentary memory of an urban cultural scene: a flashing neon sign suggested a New York fire escape, while the atmosphere drew on exhibitions and artistic milieus I had encountered in New York and Berlin, including a recurring tendency to imagine contemporary Berlin through the remembered vitality of the Lower East Side in an earlier and very extinct New York.
The performance deliberately resisted the accumulation of conventional dramatic energy. Musical and theatrical gestures were allowed to extend beyond their immediate function: a rotating light continued rotating for a bit too long, guitar distortion accumulated and lingered, bodies remained in space, and moments of apparent inactivity became part of the dramaturgy. Rather than moving progressively towards a climax, the work produced a sense of temporal suspension, melancholy and dissipation. The intention was not to make a durational work in the strict sense, but to investigate how relatively short theatrical events can produce an altered experience of duration by manipulating attention, repetition, expectation and the threshold between significant action and waiting.
The experience was conceived as something close to an altered state: a theatrical situation in which the audience’s perception of time, space and dramatic significance could become slightly displaced. The static arrangement of the audience was important to this. Rather than spectators moving through a sequence of scenes, the environment and its gestures changed around them, allowing attention to settle on things that might ordinarily function only as transitions or background.
The title ALEXANDRIA refers to C. P. Cavafy’s 'The God Forsakes Antony' and to ‘Alexandria’ as a psychologically and temporally liminal place: a place of departure, of recognising that a particular moment has ended and of crossing a threshold into what follows. This idea was connected to my observation of artistic scenes that had begun to turn themselves into memories of their own earlier vitality, and had begun to foreground memorialisation of what once was as the artistic material itself. The work therefore moved between geographical and temporal elsewhere: New York and Berlin, the contemporary and the remembered, the living scene and the scene already becoming history.
The reworking of Handel’s moral narrative provided a parallel structure. The original work’s movement towards moral resolution was replaced by withdrawal, dissipation and refusal. In this sense, the historical musical material became a vehicle for a broader investigation into what happens when theatrical energy is allowed to disperse rather than accumulate – and whether suspension, lingering and the experience of being held within a situation can generate forms of intensity other than those produced by dramatic progression.
