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March 01, 2005
Motionsickness at the opera...ehh...ballet
I am prone to motion sickness. During the first glider flight of the season I just know I will get sick. It fades away when my body adjusts again to the movements of the airplane. Since I know this I anticipate and it doesn't become a problem.
To my surprise I had a tad of motion sickness when we went to the ballet adaptation of Don Giovanni tonight. Cause was the delusional scenery: a front scrum with dancers performing behind it.
Since they used four of this screens on the deep Muziektheater stage to project buildings, walls, landscapes and different kind of 3D effects on it, it was sometimes hard to follow the onstage action. It was just too much visual information. Not good, for the story gets rather abstract when it's just limited to ballet. I don't want to question myself where to look.
A real miss is the final image. Don Giovanni is in hell, staged and lighted beautifully, but then this image is replaced by a sunset projection: devastating overkill. We know he's dead!
Rob Zuidam adapted the Mozart score, sometimes brilliantly and most of the time pretty good. Some moments I had associations with 1970s disco versions of Mozart's symphony no. 40, mainly since I felt the percussion sometimes as an intrusion to the original music. Especially the use of the hi-hat was annoying after a while, it sounded like a trick.
Volkskrant critic Frits van der Waa wrote after the premiere, he found the parts Zuidam composed to bridge the cuts in the Mozart score took the form of welds, and I agree with him. I wonder what I would have done, in this situation, but the difference is just too big. Perhaps Zuidam should have digested Mozart more into his own language overall to make it really work. (Mozarts music, btw, does work by itself: a real pitfall.)
To adapt a Mozart score in this way is pretty darn hard and I admire Rob Zuidam for doing it.
Posted by Renske at 23:17 UTC | permanent link