Remember me! Memory Lapse as a Model for Stage Direction
The eye is sleeping
until the mind wakes it up with a question.
- Arabic proverb
I like to remember things my own way.
- David Lynch, Lost Highway
In the darkness of eternity, circulating since immemorial time, two bodies meet at the cross point of their orbits. Dido and Aeneas laugh.
”What a happy coincidence!”
“You again.”
“Let us remember!”
They sit down at the shore (a mare) and let their memories ride on the waves. Time turns into space here.
Carthage is a remote place, dating back to 300 BCE, created in seconds on a fragmented clock face. Queen Dido loved the Trojan Aeneas, who will leave her, as we remember, whereupon the disappointed one takes her own life.
… (tick tack)
… (tick tack)
In 1689 she reappears in the London district of Chelsea and sings English.
Today Dido can no longer remember exactly. But something in her follows a call and so she runs, like a freshly hatched turtle, and falls into the sea and lets herself drifting. Aeneas follows, the sound of the waves lures him, it soon becomes melody, speech and echo. And suddenly: in the middle of the sea: an island. Two other bodies are already stranded there on remnants of a broken past. And now all four sit together, on the ruins of their memory: queen, sister, girlfriend and prince ...
1
"Remember me" whispers the Opera (la Grande Dame) and because her game relies on remembering, she can jump wherever she wants, we follow. Because what is sung about here is said to have happened and this is why we can imagine it. The queen loves the prince, a witch sends her to ruin, Dido dies. So powerful is such musictheatrical innuendo that little is needed to make us believe that this action is taken from the reality we are living in, and so we can visualise it with the help of our knowledge, our imagination and our memory.
But what is the actual "real" thing? It’s the product Dido and Aeneas itself, an object invented and compiled by the composer Henry Purcell and his poet Nahum Tate. The bequeathed score alone is part of our reality, coming to live just in the very moment as we hear it. Because in it everything is discernible already: images, feelings, actions. It is nothing less than a historical map whose traces we follow and whose perhaps long forgotten landscapes can be recreated in our memory.
The here recorded landmarks and places of such a map are multifarious and ambiguous, because a traditional score can function as a complex field of different semantic subspaces. Through design and form, a musictheatrical composition makes statements regarding the social constitution of its characters: status, power constellations, dependency (the sociocultural space), genre-conditioned actions and conventions: deus ex machina, ritornel, dance interludes (the space of actions), states of being: ghost appearances, allegories, the inner voice (the ontological space), about physical states of the narrated world: “Gathering Thunderstorm", "Night", "The King’s Palace" (the physical space) and about their historical circumstances: breeches role, orchestral scoring, revisions and extemporisations (the paradiegetic space). The statements that are made by means of a semantic classification of music can complement, comment or contradict each other. For example, the "echo music" that Purcell creates for the choir in Act II of Dido and Aeneas can be determined both physically and ontologically: it is the ravines that sound here or rather an inner voice? The poet Hans G Helms points in this respect to the fact that Opera owes its artistic rank and its now forgotten political efficiency exactly such discrepancy between a linear libretto and a dialectical musical structure. The example of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, in turn, makes it possible to experience the confrontation with Dido's own suicide at the same time as her decision to let go of her yearning and Aeneas: "death must come when he is gone". Minutes later, she is already dead.
A faulty copy? a kink in the perception? a wormhole?
It should be noted that the decryption of those semantic levels of music does not happen in the course of linear time, i.e. not directly in the appearance of the respective musical stimuli, but in the non-temporal experience of the listener, who is here sorting, matching and classifying all the parameters. The philosopher Henri Bergson coined the term durée for this psychological process. To describe the procedure of a musical experience, the following situation is quoted from his work "Essais sur les données immédiates de la conscience":
"Whilst I am writing these lines, the hour strikes on a neighbouring clock, but my inattentive ear does not perceive it until several strokes have made themselves heard. Hence I have not counted them; and yet I only have to turn my attention backwards to count up the four strokes which have already sounded and add them to those which I hear. If, then, I question myself carefully on what has just taken place, I perceive that the first four sounds had struck my ear and even affected my consciousness, but that the sensations produced by each one of them, instead of being set side by side, had melted into one another in such a way as to give the whole a peculiar quality, to make a kind of musical phrase out of it. [...] In a word, the number of strokes was perceived as a quality and not as a quantity: it is thus that duration (durée) is presented to immediate consciousness.“ (translated by F. L. Pogson; George Allen & Company, Ltd., 1910, p.127-128)
The linear time of the sounding score thus presents itself as the space of numerical quantity of stimuli that our consciousness collects, whereas the musical space (as the space of duration/durée) is experienced as the quality of an organic structuring of these stimuli and their fusion, within a not-linearly expanding “inner time”. This inner state is therefore in constant motion. It swells around the experience of duration, i.e. the moments of permanent sensations and insights, continuously, "like a snowball, it rolls itself up, becoming avalanche-like" (Bergson). The musical space of a sounding score unfolds itself according to this system. By relying on this very nature of its physical stimuli, music is thus able to design time in the sense of duration (durée). We experience Dido's fate in the snowball of our memory, in which unbridled joy and unbearable suffering are mingled.
2
The score, performed by musicians, embodied as a disembodied sound, has a given autonomy and a tangible effectiveness due to its unique combination of words and music, which is not necessarily perceived only through the medium of a staging. In order to experience the entire content of a score, nothing more has to be known than a manageable amount of relevant information about characters and plot. In times of the mechanical reproducibility of works of art, where the act of hearing has decoupled from the act of seeing long ago, the scenic performance has become quite superfluous for the experience of an opera. Today we put in a CD or choose a digital player, we close our eyes, we meet Dido and Aeneas in our very own memory. The movement of thoughts, the intellectual and sentimental journeys which are affected only by listening to this music and fuelled by our imaginative powers, can anyway never be depicted by any theater stage. The favola sounds again – according to its origin - entirely in musica.
Such insights lead to a freedom and huge responsibility within the work of stage directing. Assuming that there are almost no technical or moral limits to what can be implemented on stage, the directors have to be even more aware of what they really want to show - and how. Shall these outdated ideals, archaic beliefs and inscrutable manners still be represented (i.e. remembered) at all? What can be achieved by interpreting and therefore conserving them? How to show a deus ex machina nowadays? how to show love?, jealousy?, or this indescribable grief that leads to death?
First of all, the scenic signs (gesture, costume, lighting design, etc.) must be freed from a “default interpretation”, in which they are continuously welded together with the music being played and the text being sung. On the contrary, all aesthetic means of design should be applied to kindle the viewer's playful search for meaning and not simply to replace the function of the brain, which is putting together one single stable reality from various sensory stimuli. A theatrical performance of Purcell's and Tate’s score is much more of an augmented reality, bigger than life, more ambiguous, more fragile; a swarm of multiple meanings, buzzing around our head and following us through the piece. We follow all these soundmarks of a score like we would follow the waypoints in an atlas. Witches' laughter, birdsong, glaring lights, melismas, lament, drapery. Everything in its place. And subjectively we short-circuit such stimuli from 1688 with the actual reality to create, affirm, and enrich our worldview. The work of the director is somehow that of a curator: in which space do I place this sound?, in the vicinity of which text do I present this gesture? What distance is needed to each other, which light, which time? And with what desired effect do I let all this interlock? Accordingly, the scenic performance of a musical composition acts as a complex trigger of our cultural memory - and this, however, even or especially when something is leaking between music, text and image, and a noticeable gap full of reality arises:
"In 1826, Goethe speaks of the 'imperfection of the English theater stage' and [...] he asks, 'Who is expected to put up with such a thing nowadays?' [...] Since then the machinery has been improved for a hundred years and the claim of 'naturalness' has led us to such an illusionism that we, the subsequents, are more than willing to accept a Shakespeare play on stage rather than one that no longer requires phantasy and produces no more imagination. In Goethe's time, the improvement of the machinery for illusion-making was not yet perfect and so [...] the theater itself was still a place of reality, where imagination and creativity could still make art out of nature. These venues were theatrical exhibitions in which the stage constructors artistically designed the public life, the actor was still a performer, not an illusionist [...]."
3
Such imperfection, housed in the theaters of that time and set against the illusionism of the stage of his contemporaries a hundred years later by Bertolt Brecht in his text quoted here, plays a central role in what could be called the spectatorial "act of complementing". This act, which the spectators accomplish during the experience of a theatrical performance, connects them creatively with the universe of the piece. The gap is here assumed as a virtual sign that can actively be designed by stage direction. It is not used as a matter of deconstruction or destabilisation, but as an instrument to deregulate the perception of those scenic signs that are commonly used on stage. Whenever there is a gap - that is, when something apparently “does not go together” - the viewers jump in and close it with their own memory, knowledge and imagination, they put their own biography on the piece, if you will, they become congruent with the piece. This does not happen in those moments when the presented images, characters or actions are consciously compared with what was expected, just because it now occurred in an unexpected way. Rather, both viewers and performers bring themselves into the same state of sensation (of feeling, of sentiment), a rare form of "belief" in all what is happening within the framed world of the piece. Such a congruence between the recipient and the performance can be achieved, if the scenic arrangement of what was found to be the inner movement of music and text becomes an inward movement of the viewer (in the sense of Bergson’s snowball). On this occasion the "reality of the theater" regularly contributes to our perception of the piece, especially in musictheater, where the actual work of singing and music-making is not part of the narrated world, but neither can exist without the other. During an opera performance we are not only following the characters through a plot, but at the same time witnessing an ensemble of singers who indulge in the experience of creating these characters. We experience the canvas, the brush stroke, the varnish and the actual painting at once.
Brecht recognised such involvement of the spectator as a revolutionary force and, in his realisation of an Epic Theater, referred to the "beautiful act of complementation", elucidating the pleasant and the instructive of this dialectical work as follows: "The restoration of the reality of theater as a theater itself is a premise for there can be realistic depictions of human coexistence." Confronted with the Brechtian "barren stage" which imposes the labor of concretisation and thus counteracts the paralysis and atrophy of imagination, a contemporary view on the world is conveyed to the audience: "[the world] is considered mutable and changeable, as full of contradictions in unstable uniformity. The beholder must be able to mentally change the elements, that is, to assembly.” For Brecht, completing means above all „to understand oneself in its time“, in other words: to remember. That is exactly what happens to Dido in search of her past. And we, the spectators, follow her. Are we still on the ruins of Carthage? Is this the palace, this the forest, this the harbor? Is the pleasure that I see there, that of the character or the singer? What is a queen, what is a witch? Who is laughing? And wherever I stumble, stutter, get stuck, my memory comes to aid and replenishes me. It is an attempt to restore the congruence of spectators and performance. We step in for Dido if her memory falters. We close the gap, this hole in eternity, we finish the story:
remember me.
At the same time we liberate her from the burden of historiography:
but forget my fate.
Did she die? Let us recall.
The text was written for the production of Henry Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" at the Hamburg State Opera (Opera Stabile, 2016).