Tales of Magical Realism

Tales of Magical Realism (part 2) follows on from Sven Werner's successful Cryptic Night, leading the audience, one by one, through four more episodes of the film-maker's mechanical film installation. A narrative, half beat poet and half hard-boiled detective, guides the viewer through the peep-show theatres housed inside Tramway 4's elongated space, evoking the romanticism of a childhood journey that slowly sours into a totalitarian nightmare.

While waiting for the funding for his film to arrive - Werner admits that this can be a slow process - he decamped to Glasgow and began work on what would become these short scenarios. It is difficult to define Tales: starting off with a small band and a chained dancer, the main presentation is divided into four short stories, each with their own viewing booth. Thanks to the headphones, every audience member must listen along, and the booths shut off the outside world. This magic is a solitary experience.



Three of the scenes are dedicated to travel - on a train, meeting a taxi at the station, the journey to a mythical city in the back of the taxi - while the fourth is, ironically, the destination: the viewer now having to cycle to power the light, and the character trapped in a factory that seems to generate light from human exertion. The anticipate of the first three chapters is cunningly flipped: the excitement of the open road's potential replace by the stasis of the city. Having built up the romance, Werner bleakly shifts gear, concluding on a despairing vision of modernity where humans are not replaced by machines but are forced to act like them.

The use of black and white imagery gives Tales a nostalgic atmosphere: the story is dream-like, and the music, which seems to have come from David Lynch's lost films, never lets the tension break. The sonorous voice, the matter-of-fact description of fantastic happenings, the hyper-real vision of the final destination: Werner catches the strict attention to detail and the loose symbolism that made magical realism bold and exciting when it first appeared from Latin America.

Ecstatic Arc @ Tramway

Following on from Inducer - a Cryptic night collaboration that animated the broken husks of mechanical gods - Robbie Thomson's Ecstatic Arc rescues the tesla coil from scientific scrutiny for a study of the evolution of electricity. Sound-tracked by appropriately alien-sounding electronic music, although the climax features suspiciously old school beats, Thomson rotates a lighting scheme around various metal and electrical sculptures, before finally revealing his magnificent coil, sparking and cracking to life in bolts of purple energy.

Thomson's technique, of crafting suggestive objects from discarded or found materials, lend the performance the atmosphere of a modernist installation. Wires suggested out-dated satellites, the flash of small white lights illuminating patches of what appears to be a factory space. Beginning in darkness, and gradually revealing each of the pieces, Ecstatic Arc follow a clear narrative: a creation myth, as smaller flashes give way to the majestic finale.

Ecstatic Arc describes the development of electrical energy. From the tentative first movements - the tiny lights flickering, the music growling in fragmented menace - to the dramatic unveiling of the huge tesla coil, electricity is manifesting itself as light and sound. The almost timid introduction gives way to more recognisable shapes and more light: suspended from the ceiling, tangles of wires evoke antennae or the remains of a 1970s space programme. Even the coil itself has a certain nostalgia: massive, industrial, it is caged like a dangerous animal, a reminder of how raw electricity is dangerous as well as generous.

By moving from the tamed lights of the introduction towards the wild explosions of the coil, Thomson uncovers the journey of electricity from its brute creation to polite bringer of light and heat. The smell of ozone and the volume of the finale recast electricity, evoking the mad scientist of b-movies, the moment when Frankenstein gives life to his monster. The programme notes express Thomson's worry that electricity has become too distant, that the elegant computer interface hides its source of power, like the packaging of meat disguises the slaughter-house. Ecstatic Arc makes the electric fearsome again.

Bluebeard @Tramway (1)

33 1/3 Collective's version of Bluebeard is not inspired by the original fairy-tale, but Bartok's shaping of the tale of a murderous husband into an early twentieth century opera.  The lack of live, visible performers - aside from three men who interact sporadically with the giant cube which becomes the canvas for the remarkable projections - lends this musical the atmosphere of a scenographic set-piece, a bravura display of modern technology's ability to deceive the eye: requiring a knowledge of Bartok's story, it uses spectacular projection to examine the psychology of the seven rooms through which Bluebeard leads his wife.

Despite the incredible video - at one point, a floating chair passes across a lake of tears, possibly real but impossible to tell - the narrative is blunt and the emphasis is on mood rather than explication. The sequences are clearly marked - coins for the room of wealth, the noble's lands in a state of warfare - but the limited spoken text wanders around the point, making generalisations rather than focussing the meaning.

This Bluebeard, being a copy of a version of a fairy-tale possibly based on an earlier saint's myth or the life of a serial killing nobleman, Gilles de Rais, sacrifices much of the emotional kick of Bartok's opera - his Bluebeard is a weeping tyrant, while Perrault's  seventeenth century version is a wife-killer who gets his. It's more interesting as a meditation on Bartok's themes, even if these are sometimes unclear and an example of how the meaning of a story, expressed through the medium, is shifted by different eras.

When Perrault wrote his version in 1697, France was still in the grip of the ancien regime, and the aristocracy retained a potent symbolism: the murderous nobleman was a threat as familiar as today's corrupted Old Etonian. Bluebeard was a killer, his dead wives stuffed in the basement and his defeat, at the hands of his wife's family, was justice served. By the time of Bartok, and the various revolutions that shook Europe and weakened the aristocratic hand.

Perrault's Bluebeard is not a mere figure of fantasy - if he was inspired by the stories about the real life Gilles de Rais, the historical Bluebeard lived around two hundred years before Perrault, a relatively short period in the pre-industrial age and just enough time to ferment the details from facts into legend. He represents a corrupted version of authority still powerful: for all the fanciful happy ending, Bluebeard's monstrosity is a potential allegory for the impact of aristocratic influence on the people.

Bartok seems far more sympathetic to poor Bluebeard - his wives aren't even dead, just locked up in a dungeon wearing fancy clothes. Fair enough, his wife Judith still ends: she won't have it. Later, Angela Carter would go back to Perrault to fashion a feminist fable The Bloody Chamber. Bartok, however, is blaming the victim and Judith's insatiable curiosity leads to her downfall.

Since the wikipedia entry notes that there is some confusion about the number of Bluebeard's wives, it is possible that Judith is not the same wife as Carter's more feisty heroine. Or maybe Bluebeard started off in the Bartok style, just chaining his wives up in dungeons, before graduating to hacking them up.

Since 33 1/3 explicitly use Bartok as a reference, however, it's worth considering whether the anti-feminism of the opera continues into their multi-media extravaganza. The baddie doesn't really turn up - Judith is in a few of the projections, and perhaps the serious voice-over is Bluebeard: the piece is more interested in representing the various rooms, leading the audience through them. Judith and Bluebeard become cyphers for the audience experience.

Bartok's age still had an attitude towards genuine blue-bloods - the revolutions may have shaken them, they were still knocking about, causing shit and insisting on privilege. The emasculated Bluebeard (not that stabbing wives is some great sign of masculinity, but it's tougher than sobbing over them) echoes Perrault's version and his new weakness is telling. Once upon a time, Bluebeard got to kill with impunity. By the beginning of the twentieth century, he can't even prevent his wife flooding the castle with light.

33 1/3 disappear him: the rooms are more important, their psychological symbolism is all. This isn't always clear enough and the brilliance of the projections is sufficiently showy that it discourages deep meditation. The sudden appearance of ducks is a bit too comic: 33 1/3 don't quite manage to get the meditative atmosphere.

Having said that, writing about it has made me want to see it again. It deserves a great deal of thought...

Remembering Her

Thanks to Dido's Lament and Virgil's ambiguously sympathetic portrayal of her in The Aeneid, Dido is one of the few tragic heroines who might escape from the patriarchal hegemony of classical mythology. Claudia Molitor's decision to pair her with Eurydice - far more of a cypher in her story, a foil to Orpheus's grand passion - consciously deconstructs the scope of scale of both opera and mythology - and converts the lineal narrative of their dramas in to an allusive, fragmented, intimate reinvention.

In her notes, Molitor explains that the inspiration for Remember Me came as much from a gift - her grandmother's desk - as the big stories. Opening the desk, she realised that the interior was possibly the "only physical space she could have truly called her own." From this, a re-examination of Dido makes sense: despite Purcell and Virgil enhancing her in their respective portrayals of this Queen of Carthage, she is always dependent on the larger drama of her beloved Aeneas.

Molitor refuses the grand scale of opera - played out in two rooms, a mixture of video projection, intimate solo performance, recorded music and 'object manipulation' (Molitor, as performer, arranges familiar items around the desk to create a model of an operatic set), Remember Me is poignant rather than melodramatic. Cheeky touches - Cinderella helps out with the plot by Dido and Eurydice to rescue themselves, and an ink bottle stands in for Aeneas - emphasise Molitor's light touch, although the final action - a whispered plea - is both emotive and intimate.

The rejection of both simple rewriting of myth - Dido's ultimate plan is never fully articulated - and the grandeur of opera suggests that the recreation of mythology for a more inclusive era will not imitate existing art, but replace it with something more tentative.

Sandglasses @ Tramway

It's unsurprising that Sandglasses evades easy description: a combination of intense sound and more reflective video projection, the experience of the work is more important than subsequent analysis. And for its talk of being based on an exploration of "the acoustic, visual and symbolic meanings of sand-timers," Sandglasses has little in common with programmatic compositions that try to evoke scenes or narratives. The scale of the performance - four cellist, encased in huge cylinders, surrounded by rotating and, at times, suffocating projections - and the gradual build in volume says very little about those small, quiet objects that sit on the table and count down to the perfect boiled egg.

Juste Janultyte's composition - essentially a microtonal drone that uses the full range of the cello's register, from harmonic squeak to full-bodied baritone - convinces as a classical analogue to the rock experimentation of bands like Earth, who throw the immensity of the metal riff into a deep freeze. Minimal, but not in the sense of Glass' repetitions, it allows the differences in the speed and attack of each cello to expose details of sound, unfamiliar harmonies and, as the volume increases, the power of amplified strings. It avoids traditional

In isolation, the music is an endurance test, a display of compositional bravura that relies on the skill of the four cellists of the Gaida Ensemble. The projections, although tending towards a genric presentation of distressed surfaces, the occasional magnified grain of sand or water dripping down an eroded metal, add a layer of disturbing decay, illustrating the sound on an impressive scale. Rotating around the cellists, encasing them then releasing them, it propels Sandglasses into a more sinister intensity.

Unfortunately, these gestures do not support the programme notes' insistence that this is in any way about sand-timers. The scale is too vast, the music too ferocious, more suited to the end of times than a short wait for dinner. Juste Janulyte is clearly fascinated by the way than sound and vision can be integrated, and creates an unholy, immersive spectacle. But until some description is found - the notes fall into that ugly language that has effectively undermined broader discussion of Live Art for the past thirty years - sonic art is going to struggle to convince that it has much to add beyond pure aesthetic experience.

Quick mention of Sonica and I, Tommy (inappropriate comparisons?)

Art - performance, music, painting, film, mixed-media, multi-platform, improvisation or scripted - can pose two sets of questions. One set concentrates on the formal matters - how does this piece relate to the  nature of art? The other emphasises questions of content - what is it about, and how does it present the subject? A third set of questions - discussing how do the content and form relate to each other - emerges from these.

Both Remember Me (Claudia Molitor) and Sandglasses (Juste Janulyte), the opening blasts of Sonica, pose more questions about form than function. Remember Me does have a fairly explicit feminist content, re-imagining the myths of two operatic heroines, but the restructuring of their stories is part of Molitor's broader re-invention of how contemporary composition can be experienced. And for all Sandglasses promises of exploring "the acoustic, visual and symbolic meanings of sand-timers," it is predominantly an aesthetic experience as the spectacular visuals illustrate the microtonal drone of four cellos.

By comparison with I, Tommy, the savage satire of Glaswegian socialist and swinger Tommy Sheridan, Remember Me and Sandglasses have slight content: I, Tommy is all content, and little aesthetic. Equally, the music-hall antics of the play are at the exact opposite of the stark minimalism of the two sound pieces. Yet in this comparison, their worth becomes clearer: rather than encourage rapid, emotional responses, Remember Me and Sandglasses offer meditations on themes that are beautiful and cerebral.

Claudia Molitor: A Good Memory

Within the extensive programme of Sonica, Claudia Molitor stands out not only due to her background a composer - alongside a cohort of visual artists and musicians coming from an electronic tradition - but because the scale of her Remember Me is more modest than spectacular. "In a time when 'big', 'more', 'hi-...' are often considered better and more exciting," she says. "There is, for me, a desire to counterbalance this and focus on the smaller, the neglected, the less audible and visible." While she draws on the stories of opera - imagining a friendship between the classical tragic victims Dido and Eurydice - she has pinned her multi-media opera inside a desk, at Scotland Street School Museum.

"This piece tries to draw the listener-spectator into a sonic space where small sounds become big events, where the senses are heightened to hear what we might usually miss," Molitor continues. "I am fascinated with the way that we can occupy ourselves in a world with trials and tribulations and great big events and ideas (like in an opera) with only a pencil and paper, a made up song or a few toys when we are children." Taking her cue from this, Molitor condensed the grand themes into a tiny space. " So miniaturist on the surface yes, but still with all the big ideas and ideals!"

Remember Me also stands out in the festival programme as one of two pieces - the other is Bluebeard - that explicitly connects to opera, the original "total art" that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, was seen as an integrative performance to include all of the other arts. There's a a clear line from that vision of opera to Cathie Boyd's vision for Sonica, although whereas last time, it ended up with Wagner, the scope of Cryptic's festival offers more intimate works with equally lofty ambitions.

Molitor expands. "Themes in opera are of course grand and big and tragic, they seem hyper-real, but then those themes touch all our lives, because essentially opera is always a reflection of the way society understands itself at any given time, in any given socio-political or cultural situation. It reflects on the way people relate to and interact with each other. Of course on the opera stage this is highly stylised, but then it is in my work too, but in a very different way." 

Yet the scale of Remember Me, and even the original inspiration - the gift of an antique from Molitor's grandmother - insist that this is a far more personal performance than a grand-standing comment on these socio-political situations. Her heroines may have been victims in their stories, but art has given them a grandeur and sympathy. "They are very different, but what they both have in common is that they are defined by very specific roles in their respective stories," she comments,

"In terms of music and opera I see a connection when looking at two arias: Dido's Lament in Purcell's opera is one of the most well known operatic arias where Dido laments her absent lover Aeneas, who is travelling the seas; Orpheus' lament for Eurydice, lost to him to the Underworld after she has been bitten by a snake, in Gluck's opera is a similarly celebrated aria," she adds. "These two laments to me highlight how the female voice in opera and, in turn, in society exists in relation to the male, rarely on its own terms. This is an important aspect of opera, where the most fantastical arias are often sung by the female voice, but that female element is more often than not the aspect that has unsettled the status quo, which by the end of the opera is re-established often by the death of the heroine." 

Like many a student reading The Aeneid at sixteen, realising how unfairly Dido is being treated both by the author Virgil and her lover Aeneas, Molitor hopes to save Dido. Unlike the student, however, she has not approached this by becoming a Latin teacher before realising his vocation was in criticism. "In a way, that's what Remember Me proposes, a construction of a space where this female voice can enter on her own terms... an alternative “ending” for Dido and Eurydice." 

Remember Me more than embodies Sonica's tagline of "sonic art for the visually minded": it speaks to wider concerns about both how performance is consumed, deliberately avoiding the fashion for the monumental - perhaps often visible in the work of Scottish theatre companies - while seriously considering the way that art can both reveal historical perspectives, in this case about women, and then address them and look towards change.  

Scotland Street School, 8, 14, 15 November. Various times

Sonica 000: What is Sonica?

Sonica is a new festival, curated by Cryptic. It has the slogan "sonic art for the visually minded." A logical expansion of Cryptic's recent theatre productions, Orlando and The Little Match Girl Passion, which integrated live music and performance, Sonica emphasises the connection between visual artists and music. 

There are few cities where this connection is more explicit than in Glasgow: Cryptic Nights has encouraged musicians to take risks in presenting their work, to escape the generic gig and think about the context (recent highlights included a drum solo out in nature, and a dub-step inflected fashion show), and allowed visual artists to explore their sound obsessions - Raydale Dower got concrete, Robbie Thomson had a three way mechanical mash up with Jack Wrigley and Sarah Milne - and SWG3 and The Glue Factory host bands and clubs as often as exhibitions and installations. The exhaustive study of Glasgow's art community, Social Sculpture not only catalogued the connections, but became a manifesto for future graduates from the Art School. 

Equally, there is unlikely to be many people more suited to developing the festival than Cryptic's artistic director Cathie Boyd. A tireless campaigner for imaginative, original performance - a director herself for many years, she is now encouraging a young generation of artists to follow in her footsteps, by refusing boundaries and looking for new combinations - Boyd was one of the artists who emerged in Glasgow in the years following its time as  European City of Culture in 1990. Her enthusiasm for international performance and the challenging was nurtured by Tramway's adventurous programming in the 1990s, and it is appropriate that, through Sonica, she is bringing exciting events into Tramway's programme.

Because Sonica's remit is so specific - the slogan is more than mere marketing, it does make sense of the various shows - a festival is essential to build a critical response to the work. There's no easy way of describing the genre of this work - Musical Theatre? Sound Installation? Audio-Visual Presentations? - the number of performances works to give the overall programme a context. 

Sonica 001: Ecstatic Arc

What is it?
Ecstatic Art is a performance starring stuff found by Robbie Thomson, filled with recording devices. Previous Thomson "junk operas" have evoked mechanical gods, no longer worshipped by still reciting their mysteries, sinister and pathetic.

Who is the artist?
Robbie Thomson is a shy resident of Glasgow, who has been part of the Mighty 85a Collective, and he loves to bring dead machinery back to life. Idimov, his previous piece for Cryptic, clanked and gurgled towards a quiet apocalypse: his ability to reassemble detritus into huge, threatening music boxes embodies his interest in redefining music and its relationship to visual art. Certainly, Sonica's tagline ("sonic art for the visually minded") could be Thomson's own catch-phrase.

Why attend?
Thomson's genius is never to give too much away: there is always a narrative within his performances, but they are usually subtle enough to allow the audience to follow their own interpretations. The slightly fruity language used above to describe earlier works expresses Vile's readings, but not necessarily anyone else's understanding. They tend to be abstract in the good sense: rather than being about nothing in particular, Thomson's mash-ups of sound and vision are suggestive and, surprisingly given their emphasis on the mechanical, emotional.

What's the Unique Selling Point?
Thomson in Tramway: the new industrialist-conceptualist meets the classic Glasgow home of the avant-garde. Thomson has done plenty of work in the Glue Factory, which has a similar atmosphere to Tramway, and Ecstatic Arc looks like it will have the grandeur and intensity to match the legendary venue's own majesty.

When?
8- 11 November @ Tramway. It's an installation during the day, then becomes a performance at night...