by Martha Sherman
If there are no figures, is it puppetry? If there are no dancers, is it choreography? Twenty years ago, Basil Twist introduced a groundbreaking work of puppetry and choreography – in a fish tank. After taking his lyrical and compelling “Symphonie Fantastique” around the world for the last two decades, it came back to its first home, H.E.R.E. in Soho, in a larger tank, with more performers, and a live pianist instead of a taped symphony. And the piece is more fantastique than ever.
The leap that Twist made was one of pure imagination. He used brightly colored scarves in water to tell the story of Berlioz’s romantic five-movement work. Bernstein called the music “psychedelic” and hallucinatory, likely the result of Berlioz’s opium-influenced state. Twist evoked the dream-like music by using the quality of water, allowing his puppetry materials to swoop, float, drift like the thoughts in the mind of the tortured protagonist of Berlioz’s mysterious tale.
The theater was blacked out, with only one pale light illuminating Christopher O’Riley, the live pianist who lusciously played an arrangement of the symphony for solo piano. A heavy black drape covered the water tank, aptly like a small version of a grand opera stage’s curtain. The lighting of the tank, by designer Andrew Hill, evolved to frame each movement in the feel of the music, from the brightly-lit color of the early movements about the beloved one to the increasingly dark and hallucinogenic lighting of the last two nightmare movements.
In the first movement, danced by the colored scarves most memorable from the original work, patterned twirls were occasionally wafted by a wave (or an explosion) of bubbles frothing up from the bottom. A moon-like disk rose, rotated and glowed, as blues and golds lit the water.
Early in the first movement, Berlioz introduced his “idée fixe,” the haunting melody signaling the protagonist’s beloved. In Twist’s version, she (yes, definitely a “she”) is an elegant white scarf, flowing throughout the work, like an obsession floating through a brain: ever there, regardless of the surroundings. In this case, the wafting cloth was ever beautiful, even in the witches’ dance and “Dies Irae” of the final movement.
Sometimes the cloth dancers moved upwards in parallel, often in dynamic swirls to the music. Black ink suffused the water, like sadness or fear personified, but – at least early on – the beloved banished fear. The second movement opened as the beloved was crumpled in a grayscape; she began to rotate, finally, into a dizzying spiral. Red feathers joined, lit by flashes of color, as the texture of the movement shifted with the music. Now a waltz, the music grew increasingly stirring, though it was periodically interrupted by the melody of the “idée fixe,” and the float of that scarf through the scene.
The third movement, an adagio, opened with a single note, and single streak of light. A flashlight shone into the water, soon joined by another streak of light, and the intrusion of textures: ripples of cloth, strands of a hair-like mass, threads of silver, all swirling into a rich mash of controlled movement, powered by the improvisatory artistry of the puppeteers behind the curtain.
O’Reilly’s fingers crinkled in and then folded into a brief prayer pose before beginning the fourth movement with a piano rumble that sentenced the protagonist to his execution. Instead of fanciful cloth, bubbles, or silver, the movement paraded with columns, vertical barriers in fields of gray. The familiar beloved trembled briefly through our field of vision in the final moment of execution.
In the “Witches’ Sabbath,” the fifth and final chapter in the story, the colors and mood again changed to purples and blacks, with a tiny dot of light eventually filling the waterscape, to create a black night of stars. Red sparkling eels of light and motion, dragon-like, wove through the scene, around the now-transformed beloved. Her shape and movement were tinged with the demons of Berlioz’s grotesque “Dies Irae” parody. The once lilting “idée fixe” had been transformed. Fields of light shifted, rolled, and shimmered in the wild final dance of bubbles, shapes and swirls.
At the end of the performance, the audience was invited to walk behind the curtain and see what Twist used to create this remarkable illusion: in addition to the dripping puppeteers in wetsuits, there were soggy feathers and cloth, simple columns of plastic, and lots of harnesses and poles. It couldn’t have appeared less magical backstage. This was alchemy, turning dross into gold, through creative artistry. It was a reminder of what it means to be a MacArthur Foundation genius, and why Twist so deserved that accolade.
Copyright ©2018 by Martha Sherman
“Symphonie Fantastique.” – Basil Twist
HERE
New York, NY
April 04, 2018
Cover: “Symphonie Fantastique.” Photo © Richard Termine.
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