AUSSER SICH / SALOME
Performed at ORi Berlin, September 19-22 2019. A production of People in rooms feeling things.
Soprano: Heather Green
Actor/dancer: Johnny Alexander
Actor/dancer: Marcelo Rodrigues
Baritone: Max van Wyck
Glen Sheppard, Concept / Direction / Adaptation / Visuals
Tomas Nordmark, Musical Adaptation and recomposition
Sarah Methner, Stage
Derya Issever, Costumes
Fritz Polzer, Video / Production / Dramaturgy
Tamara Heimbrock, Associate Director
AUSSER SICH was a radically reduced rendering of Richard Strauss’ SALOME, conceived as an investigation into proximity, intensity and the conditions of operatic spectatorship. The project emerged from a contradiction within opera-making: professional rehearsal can offer extraordinary physical and sensory intimacy with singers and musicians, while the public experience of opera is generally organised around distance. AUSSER SICH asked what might happen if that distance were radically reduced.
The work took place in an exceptionally small room at ORi, a gallery and production collective. Strauss’ large-scale opera was reduced to a single singer performing Salome, accompanied by two male actor-dancers. This radical reduction concentrated attention on the body, voice, gaze and spatial relationship between performer and spectator, testing how little of the operatic apparatus might be required to produce an intensely operatic experience.
My longstanding feeling about Salome is that Salome’s hunger is ultimately a hunger for more: that her desire for Jochanaan is also a desire to possess what he represents, to consume the knowledge that he has of a world beyond ours, to consume knowledge itself – not as a glutton, but as a young woman whose curiosity about the world exceeds the norms of good taste imposed upon her. In this sense, Salome became a kind of spirit animal for opera itself: she wants to get closer, to consume, to participate, to share, while the audience similarly desires to be brought ever closer to the singer, the voice and the body. This reading also pointedly upended the idea of Salome as a femme fatale, a monster, the murderer of the prophet, a vehicle of both misogyny and orientalist fantasy.
The performance was simultaneously viewed from a second adjacent room through a live video feed, creating two distinct degrees of proximity to the same event. At the moment of Salome’s dance, the door between the rooms was opened and the two male actor-dancers entered the second space, temporarily dissolving the physical boundary between the audiences at the opera’s most transgressive theatrical moment.
The environment was conceived as a kind of colonial wellness retreat, somewhere between Africa and East Asia, displacing the opera from its conventional historical and theatrical frame while invoking exoticism, fantasy and the Western imagination of elsewhere.
The work therefore treated proximity itself as a theatrical material. Rather than reproducing Salome on a smaller scale, it used its extreme dramatic and musical material to investigate what happens when the distance between singer and spectator is radically reduced – when the singer is experienced not as a distant figure within an operatic machine, but as an immediate, embodied presence.
Soprano: Heather Green
Actor/dancer: Johnny Alexander
Actor/dancer: Marcelo Rodrigues
Baritone: Max van Wyck
Glen Sheppard, Concept / Direction / Adaptation / Visuals
Tomas Nordmark, Musical Adaptation and recomposition
Sarah Methner, Stage
Derya Issever, Costumes
Fritz Polzer, Video / Production / Dramaturgy
Tamara Heimbrock, Associate Director
AUSSER SICH was a radically reduced rendering of Richard Strauss’ SALOME, conceived as an investigation into proximity, intensity and the conditions of operatic spectatorship. The project emerged from a contradiction within opera-making: professional rehearsal can offer extraordinary physical and sensory intimacy with singers and musicians, while the public experience of opera is generally organised around distance. AUSSER SICH asked what might happen if that distance were radically reduced.
The work took place in an exceptionally small room at ORi, a gallery and production collective. Strauss’ large-scale opera was reduced to a single singer performing Salome, accompanied by two male actor-dancers. This radical reduction concentrated attention on the body, voice, gaze and spatial relationship between performer and spectator, testing how little of the operatic apparatus might be required to produce an intensely operatic experience.
My longstanding feeling about Salome is that Salome’s hunger is ultimately a hunger for more: that her desire for Jochanaan is also a desire to possess what he represents, to consume the knowledge that he has of a world beyond ours, to consume knowledge itself – not as a glutton, but as a young woman whose curiosity about the world exceeds the norms of good taste imposed upon her. In this sense, Salome became a kind of spirit animal for opera itself: she wants to get closer, to consume, to participate, to share, while the audience similarly desires to be brought ever closer to the singer, the voice and the body. This reading also pointedly upended the idea of Salome as a femme fatale, a monster, the murderer of the prophet, a vehicle of both misogyny and orientalist fantasy.
The performance was simultaneously viewed from a second adjacent room through a live video feed, creating two distinct degrees of proximity to the same event. At the moment of Salome’s dance, the door between the rooms was opened and the two male actor-dancers entered the second space, temporarily dissolving the physical boundary between the audiences at the opera’s most transgressive theatrical moment.
The environment was conceived as a kind of colonial wellness retreat, somewhere between Africa and East Asia, displacing the opera from its conventional historical and theatrical frame while invoking exoticism, fantasy and the Western imagination of elsewhere.
The work therefore treated proximity itself as a theatrical material. Rather than reproducing Salome on a smaller scale, it used its extreme dramatic and musical material to investigate what happens when the distance between singer and spectator is radically reduced – when the singer is experienced not as a distant figure within an operatic machine, but as an immediate, embodied presence.
