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23.5.06

The Artist and the Audience 

Graham Vick, encenador do próximo Ring de Wagner, explica as suas ideias sobre ópera e público de ópera, publico o texto no final deste post. Versão original encontrada em Opera Europa.

Após a leitura deste texto concluo que Vick continua na fase de jovem Siegfried, continua absolutamente utópico, o que não será mau, mas que ainda não entendeu a essência do fenómeno wagneriano. Wagner deixou ser socialista e utópico depois de 1849, para em 1854 vir a ser pessimista e schopenhauriano. Graham Vick não passou do Feuerbach e do Bakunine. O público que Wagner desejou já existe, basta ir Munique, na semana antes do dia 31 de Julho, ou a Bayreuth, onde apesar dos fatos escuros, toda gente sabe ao que vai e como vai. A classe média alemã está extremamente informada e preparada, encara uma ida à ópera de forma como não tenho visto em mais lugar nenhum do mundo, para mal dos pecados ingleses de Vick.
Querer um público de ignorantes na ópera a assistir a Wagner, e a gostar, é mesmo um absurdo que contraria totalmente as ideias do próprio Wagner. Wagner queria formar uma elite que rejeita a ópera convencional, fácil e acessível aos sentidos simples e pouco educados dos burgueses de então (baseada nos modelos italiano e francês), elite que seria formada democraticamente a partir de quem quisesse tomar parte mas que implicaria estudo, empenho, preparação. Um primeiro contacto poderá ser um impacto violento mas nada supera o impacto da meditação e da compreensão total do que o compositor quer dizer, pelo menos em Wagner. Como entender o Ring sem conhecer os motivos condutores, a profundidade do drama, as histórias que decorrem entre os sucessivos passos aparentes do drama? Atirar um ignorante para um teatro de ópera para que este se torne por iluminação um membro do "novo público democrático" é de um absurdo utópico confrangedor.
Querer criar um público que é uma amostra fiel da população, em termos sociais, volta a ser um absurdo, por várias razões: porque a maioria da população não tem o menor interesse na ópera; porque, basicamente, o ser humano não está disponível para mudar de hábitos (Schopenhauer de novo); porque a ópera infelizmente é cara; porque não é tratando os ignorante e analfabetos e excluídos como... ignorantes e analfabetos e excluídos, que estes se tornarão apreciadores da grande arte. Não é com paternalismos fáceis que se combate a exclusão social que começa na escola, na sociedade, nos bairros pobres de Birmingham ou do Porto. Podem ser experiências interessantes para todos. Graham Vick fica de consciência tranquila e pode regressar às grandes salas, às jantaradas com artistas, aos círculos que frequenta que já se purgou da sua má consciência social e salvou os desgraçados de Birmingham ou do Porto dando-lhe umas sessões de ópera e da grande arte antes de morrerem! Não será demasiada maldade mostrar-lhes um mundo ao qual eles continuaram alheios e que continuará a ser inacessível?
Afinal onde é que se mudou a sociedade e se criou um público novo? Muito bonito mas totalmente inconsequente. O trabalho de base é muito mais difícil e um socialista utópico primitivo apesar das boas intenções é apenas isso, alguém num estágio primário. Alguém que não aprendeu com as desgraças do mundo. É bonito? Creio que sim, até aos trinta anos, depois torna-se deplorável. Siegfried tem de morrer jovem, Wotan ainda triunfa apesar do crepúsculo...
Salvam-se as encenações notáveis de Vick que, de per se, constituem objectos artísticos, como por exemplo o citado Wozzeck ou o Werther no S. Carlos, Vick apesar do utopismo inconsequente, em termos de ideologia, é um fino conhecedor dos mecanismos psicológicos dos personagens e dos mecanismos das óperas que encena. Veremos.

This is an abridged transcription of the Keynote address delivered by Graham Vick at the Valencia conference.

Opera’s first Education Department was set up by Scottish Opera in 1971, and it included me. There hasn’t been a year since when I haven’t devoted a minimum of two months a year to this kind of work. In that long time, throughout all the performances I’ve been to, in the 34 European opera houses in which I’ve directed, I would say there has been a minimal change, if any at all, in the audiences. So let’s start with that rather disappointing fact, particularly disappointing when we consider in the past 30 years how radically everything has changed around us. We are shockingly slow to shift. We are stubborn and self-referential, and part of the problem is the daily fight for survival. We focus not on the survival of the art form, but on the survival of the institution, of the profession. Well, I’m not interested in the wellbeing of the profession; I’m concerned in the wellbeing of opera. That’s my priority.

What does that mean? A performance of opera in itself is nothing without its audience. So the audience is where we need to start, because they are 50% of the operatic performance. The essential dialogue includes them. I suppose my ideal opera audience is one that demographically represents the life of the community in which it’s rooted. The birth of opera came from a desire to recreate the imagined experience of Ancient Greek drama. What we know of Ancient Greek drama is a simple shared space, the entire community in one seat price, you might say, no scenery, simple human beings, orchestra, what we now call the chorus joining audience and action, written to be part of the action and to relate directly to the audience, to break down that central area between drama and audience, performed in the daylight. Festival day, the whole town comes together, shares a space, shares the light. Receives the experience. We know little beyond that, but we do know that. We also know they wore masks. Arrive at the birth of opera, and in the place of the mask, we sing. But the frustration which led to the birth of opera is also very important to bear in mind. It was that spoken drama did not seem to be carrying artists and audience as far as they wanted to go. Opera was born out of the inadequacy of the spoken theatre. Drama in opera is not drama in theatre; that is second-rate drama. Drama in opera is first-rate drama. A lot of the work done in terms of education is done via theatre, proving that opera can be as good as theatre, that opera can be just as good as cinema. This of course is nonsense; it is simply much better.

The Greeks had a sense of the sacred, of the spiritual importance of the event. Not enough to entertain, but to deal with crucial important issues that related to everybody attending the event. This is the minimum that we should ask of our art form. To honour its history, to honour its birth, and to honour the enormous amount of public money that comes our way, money that comes from everybody’s pocket. That means that it must be accessible for everybody. But sometimes there appears to be a conspiracy against the audiences. We invent the word Education to make sure that everybody realises that, in order to enjoy and respond to a work of art, you have to be educated. Before we’ve even begun, we put a barrier down. A great performance speaks to everybody. You don’t need to learn, you don’t need to understand, have things explained to you beforehand, to receive what T.S. Eliot called ‘the direct shock of poetic intensity’. We’re giving out the wrong signal before we begin. We’re also very conveniently offering funding bodies and sponsors an opportunity for ‘feel-good’ social boxes to be ticked. It’s a way of short-circuiting the reality of the work.

In medicine, we’ve moved towards the holistic ideal. When I was 22, I would never go close a homeopath, and now that is all I will see. And I’ve learned much from this experience.

If you put at the heart of an opera company the desire to serve the art form, and genuinely make it available and invite in the complete cross-section of society, then everything that company does comes somehow or other under the heading Education. The work itself, the philosophy at the centre of the theatre must dictate the philosophy, the working methods and the attitude of every aspect of the theatre. An Education Department cannot function successfully within a bigger organisation unless there is at the heart of that organisation a faith, a belief, an attitude which it is perpetuating.

I am here with you today because I’m an artist. Much of the responsibility rests with us. We must lead, we must learn to initiate. We must learn to have a broader sense of our own responsibilities. The word ‘internationalism’ is a trap. The good side of internationalism is the communication, the sharing, the lowering of barriers. The bad side of internationalism is to create a world within a world, where everything becomes self-referential, comparative, where one’s programmes, one’s works are seen in relation to that of another opera house, of somebody else, where the whole thing becomes inward-looking. My ideal is one where the theatre’s roots are in its community, in its world. And that also requires the artists having their feet in the real world, and not merely opera house – taxi – airplane – taxi – opera house.

I was once asked by an Italian interviewer: ‘How do you define talent?’ My answer was ‘The ability to communicate, and having something to say’. All the young artists’ programmes which I’ve been involved with put 100% of their effort and emphasis on technique, on the ability-to-communicate side of that equation. I have yet to see a young artists’ programme that develops the necessity of having something to say. But that’s what separates the ordinary working person from the artist. It’s what inspires artistic ambition. It’s what makes someone worth listening to. With that quality, you can go into any arena and speak. People will listen if you have something to say. People won’t listen if you just talk. But the other skill to be taught in these programmes, throughout an opera house, to every audience and every sponsor, the skill we are in danger of losing, and the biggest threat to our own art form, is listening. It’s the only door you need to open: how to listen. But I would say 9 out 10 performances of operas I go to involve most of the singers on stage not listening. Faking it really well. An absolutely standard thing, during the process of directing, is to make sure people are listening. The catastrophe of the surtitle is to dull down the ear. While you’re mind is reading, it’s only partially responding to sound. It will be no surprise that I think opera should be performed in the language of the audience. I love directing operas in their original language, it has a place, so I’m not 100%. But its disappearance from many theatres who used to have this tradition is one of the prices of internationalism. It leads to a lack of independent voice, a following of fashion, a fear of being thought second-rate, of image of projection. Perception is the killer of our age and of our art form. What has come to matter now is what we appear to be. Do we seem to be successful? We’ve lost any sense of the absolute, of the thing itself.

For years now, I’ve run a small operation in Birmingham which originally I founded to tour the country, taking performances of opera around places which had no experience of live opera. One of the projects was a version of Wagner’s Ring in 2 evenings, 5 hours each evening, an orchestra of 18 and 12 singers. After 10 years, it became clear to me that the company was very successful, but you would go to some primary school in a deprived area of Birmingham, and see the car park filled with BMWs. Because people are smart about these things, they know how to get to what is fashionable. So I stopped the operation and reformed it. And what I am doing at the moment is a very simple, complicated thing, but it is holistic. The first project was Wozzeck. Social, political issues were absolutely clear and palpable; human concerns powerfully familiar; and for Birmingham, an urban piece. How was I going to get the audience I want to come to the opera? Birmingham has just turned the point when over 50% of people under-16 is non-white. That means that within 20 years the majority of people living in Birmingham will be non-white. How does one address that issue, if you’re looking for the demographic equivalence of the city? I decided that I would involve people in the performance itself. I would create a body of people, like the chorus in Ancient Greece, as a transmitter between performance and audience. I would use a professional orchestra, professional singers, high level work, but I would apply a conduit to the middle, and this conduit would be people who have never been to opera. And so I went out shopping for people for two years before the project, I spent evening and weekends going around the city, to various programmes, young offender programmes, probation programmes, gay men activists, none of them theatre groups, and talking about what I wanted to do as an experiment. I ended up with a group of 60 people who all wanted to give a lot of time, and 10 individual existing groups, who felt that their identities were strong, and therefore they would like their group to contribute as a group. So I planned an event in which each of these groups had one of the interludes as their own piece of ownership. All of these people I’d invited in bring with them an audience. Suddenly I have a whole filter into the city not available to me before. The audience that arrives for these performances was unlike any audience I’ve any seen at an opera. We sold out all the tickets.

Fidelio came the second year, which was even more moving as an experience, and in which I was theatrically braver. In many ways the substance of Wozzeck is more familiar to the people living on the streets in Birmingham than to an audience in Covent Garden. The territory of the piece is closer to them. Fidelio is tougher to crack, and yet the chains of the soul are something everybody understands. Everybody understands a cry in the darkness. Everybody understands the fragility of the flame of hope. These are issues you can talk to anybody about. But Fidelio in this context reveals itself not to be the story of a magnificent heroic dramatic soprano with high cheek bones. It’s the story of Mrs Florestan, and within this context you completely see, and question in a way that you never do, this housewife who finds her identity through a crisis. This story that begins in such an ordinary way and develops into an extraordinary myth, is something available to everybody. Mrs Florestan finds herself acting in an extraordinary and magnificent way, only at the end to be called Mrs Florestan. Florestan cries from the depth of the darkness and does nothing. This is exciting stuff to encounter with innocent people - innocent but not ignorant.

When I did Fidelio, the first scene I thought I’d try out was the second act quartet. This went very badly, because everybody found it too bombastic and melodramatic. Realising this, I tried the quartet of the first act: a canon, a pure musical substance, four people singing their own thoughts at the same time. This enraptured everyone, so close to everyone’s receptivity and sensibility. It’s for this one reason that I’m now doing Ulysse. Because I feel culturally that we’re moving further and further away from the 19th century, which theoretically forms the centre of the repertoire. But that in terms of sensibility, the 16th, the 17th and the 18th centuries are much closer to our own sense of sophistication, our own lack of belief in absolutism, our rejection of romantic love, of imperialism, expansionism often called patriotism. So many things of the 19th century are moving further away from us, that I think we have to look elsewhere to consider where the centre in the future is.

Graham Vick

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