UNE MYSTIFICATION / Les satyres sont morts
Presented in the Roter Salon of the Berlin Volksbühne by BAM! Berlin Aktuelles Musiktheater 10 April 2022.
Mezzo-Soprano: Marie-Gabrielle Arco
Actor: Carsten Clemens
Actor: Spyros Markopoulos (2020) / Felix Utting (2022)
Piano: Olivia Clarke (2020) / Jessica Rucinski (2022)
Glen Sheppard, Concept / Direction / Room
Derya Issever and Michael Sontag, Costumes
Pascale Jean-Louis, Hair and Make-up (2020)
Fritz Polzer, Production
UNE MYSTIFICATION was conceived as a valediction: an overnight ritual awaiting a morning that would bring a departure, imagined as a boat or ferry leaving a place forever. The work investigated waiting, ritual, attention and the theatrical experience of time, constructing a situation in which performers and audience appeared to share knowledge of a ceremony whose rules, purpose and outcome remained uncertain.
The starting material was Claude Debussy's 'Trois Chansons de Bilitis' and the invented antiquity of Pierre Louÿs's poetry collection 'Les Chansons de Bilitis'. Louÿs presented his poems as translations from the work of an ancient Greek courtesan named Bilitis, but Bilitis was his own fictional creation. This false archive became the basis for a performance concerned with the instability of cultural memory and the possibility of constructing ritual from material whose historical authority is itself fabricated. The singer, implicitly a contemporary Bilitis, has only this forged material through which to articulate herself. As the performance approaches the final song, the line "les satyres sont morts" – the satyrs are dead – becomes a threshold: an announcement of an ending whose significance remains uncertain.
The performance took place in a deconstructed semi-public environment somewhere between a room being packed up and a waiting room in a terminal: covered furniture, rolled rugs and an excess of lamps suggested a place simultaneously inhabited and already being abandoned. Four performers occupied this environment through a ritual whose object was never made explicit. They appeared to know what they were doing while simultaneously seeming uncertain of its rules, placing the audience within the same uncertainty.
Although the performance lasted approximately seventy minutes, it was conceived as the duration of a night. Rather than reproducing an overnight vigil literally, the work sought to expand the audience's experience of time through stillness, repetition, anticipation and extreme attentiveness. Small gestures, changes of position and apparently insignificant details were given unusual duration and prominence. The audience was encouraged to attend to the environment precisely because there was no conventional dramatic structure telling them what was important. Waiting became the action; departure became the event being anticipated, while remaining outside the performance.
The temporal frame was deliberately layered. The visual world was anchored in 1976, invoking the ritualistic and magical atmosphere of Jacques Rivette's film DUELLE, while also marking the waning end of a brief historical period in which homosexuality had ceased, in many parts of the West, to be necessarily fatal. This was placed in dialogue with Louÿs's imagined antiquity, C. P. Cavafy's recurring figures of departure and loss, Frank O'Hara, and the circumstances of the work's initial creation in isolation during the summer solstice of 2020.
UNE MYSTIFICATION therefore used a fabricated history to construct a deliberately uncertain ritual of departure. Its primary material was not narrative but the experience of people together in a room, waiting, and the transformation of that waiting into theatrical time. The work explored whether ritual could generate collective intensity without a fixed object, and whether waiting, rather than event or resolution, could become the principal dramatic action.
Mezzo-Soprano: Marie-Gabrielle Arco
Actor: Carsten Clemens
Actor: Spyros Markopoulos (2020) / Felix Utting (2022)
Piano: Olivia Clarke (2020) / Jessica Rucinski (2022)
Glen Sheppard, Concept / Direction / Room
Derya Issever and Michael Sontag, Costumes
Pascale Jean-Louis, Hair and Make-up (2020)
Fritz Polzer, Production
UNE MYSTIFICATION was conceived as a valediction: an overnight ritual awaiting a morning that would bring a departure, imagined as a boat or ferry leaving a place forever. The work investigated waiting, ritual, attention and the theatrical experience of time, constructing a situation in which performers and audience appeared to share knowledge of a ceremony whose rules, purpose and outcome remained uncertain.
The starting material was Claude Debussy's 'Trois Chansons de Bilitis' and the invented antiquity of Pierre Louÿs's poetry collection 'Les Chansons de Bilitis'. Louÿs presented his poems as translations from the work of an ancient Greek courtesan named Bilitis, but Bilitis was his own fictional creation. This false archive became the basis for a performance concerned with the instability of cultural memory and the possibility of constructing ritual from material whose historical authority is itself fabricated. The singer, implicitly a contemporary Bilitis, has only this forged material through which to articulate herself. As the performance approaches the final song, the line "les satyres sont morts" – the satyrs are dead – becomes a threshold: an announcement of an ending whose significance remains uncertain.
The performance took place in a deconstructed semi-public environment somewhere between a room being packed up and a waiting room in a terminal: covered furniture, rolled rugs and an excess of lamps suggested a place simultaneously inhabited and already being abandoned. Four performers occupied this environment through a ritual whose object was never made explicit. They appeared to know what they were doing while simultaneously seeming uncertain of its rules, placing the audience within the same uncertainty.
Although the performance lasted approximately seventy minutes, it was conceived as the duration of a night. Rather than reproducing an overnight vigil literally, the work sought to expand the audience's experience of time through stillness, repetition, anticipation and extreme attentiveness. Small gestures, changes of position and apparently insignificant details were given unusual duration and prominence. The audience was encouraged to attend to the environment precisely because there was no conventional dramatic structure telling them what was important. Waiting became the action; departure became the event being anticipated, while remaining outside the performance.
The temporal frame was deliberately layered. The visual world was anchored in 1976, invoking the ritualistic and magical atmosphere of Jacques Rivette's film DUELLE, while also marking the waning end of a brief historical period in which homosexuality had ceased, in many parts of the West, to be necessarily fatal. This was placed in dialogue with Louÿs's imagined antiquity, C. P. Cavafy's recurring figures of departure and loss, Frank O'Hara, and the circumstances of the work's initial creation in isolation during the summer solstice of 2020.
UNE MYSTIFICATION therefore used a fabricated history to construct a deliberately uncertain ritual of departure. Its primary material was not narrative but the experience of people together in a room, waiting, and the transformation of that waiting into theatrical time. The work explored whether ritual could generate collective intensity without a fixed object, and whether waiting, rather than event or resolution, could become the principal dramatic action.
