Dasniya and I went to see Nicolas Bringuier play Schubert and Liszt (as well as a Mazurka) on Friday night. The second half, 6 Etudes d’execution transcendentes was something special, almost meditative in its intensity.

Also I thought, while taking some photos, about the place where I spend so much of my time. Uferhalen, the various artists who make something of a home here, the tree-filled corners, the ateliers, all of this special place. I think perhaps if circumstances allow to document the mundane side of here.

owen lattimore – inner asian frontiers of china

He didn’t quite, of course. Though he might have. I downloaded the a torrent of the film and in the midst of this, became curious about what Parsifal actually says, and even thought perhaps my libretto is a different version, but here Pasifal does say, not “Qual der Liebe!” but “Pein der Liebe!”

It is not the shock of Amfortas – his wound sliced from him, cushioned on black cloth, paraded, and leaking blood like an unholy vagina – that causes him to panic so; rather it’s his sudden violent awakening to suffering. He becomes human as the rest and sees utterly how this weakness, infirmity, poisoned Amfortas, Gurnemanz, and all the Knights, ruined Kundry, Klingsor, and every last person.

Syberberg’s Parsifal rests on this horror-stricken instant, these lines which I heard and did not hear, yet nonetheless it is there.

Roméo Castellucci’s Parsifal was also close during the four hours and fifteen minutes. Partly because this is my first return to Brussels since, also because I watched parts of the second act of the film during rehearsals, noting as well, aspects, stagings, intellectualisms, which came from that into his work. The singular difference though, is Roméo’s Parsifal is that of the titular role, whereas Syberberg’s belongs to Kundry.

I left the theatre exhausted, dry-mouthed, dazed. It is a harrowing four hours without pause, and one of the most transcendent moments of art I’ve ever lived through.

I’ll dispense with some technical notes first. The print was heart-rending. Badly scratched, dirty, especially towards the end of most reels, missing sections, and obviously cut together from more than one copy. Naturally this affected the sound also, at times a mess of noise, at others jumping and skipping, unsyncing itself in jarring cuts, and mostly soft, without detail, and slightly muffled.

It is so distressing that a film of such tremendous power is reduced so, and makes me fear for its future. While DVDs are available from Syberberg’s website, this is in no way comparable to the quality of a film print, especially for a film such as this.

Armin Jordan’s conducting would fit into what I probably erroneously think of as the standard arrangement. Its not quite the dramatic brilliance of Solti, and also I’m spoiled by Hartmut Haenchen, whose ideas on how it should be played to my mind bring forth something unique. I found myself wanting Jordan to go faster in places, to not linger so much, to find a sharper dynamic. Still, it’s beautiful and there is care and attention given throughout.

And this Parsifal is Kundry, as it rightly should be. There are two Kundrys, the voice is Yvonne Minton’s, and who we see perform is Edith Clever. Edith is so convincing I thought she was in fact the singer. She is brilliant. I fell in love with her, completely taken, and it was her performance that left me stripped and emptied.

Three Parsifals. Reiner Goldberg’s voice, first Martin Kutter, then Karin Krick, finally both of them. It was likely this that caused some to walk out during act two.

It begins with photographs under water, dirt-stained and begrimed. The camera circles over, sometimes nearer sometimes pulling away. The Reichstag gutted, the Statue of Liberty toppled and half-buried (I thought, is this from Planet of the Apes?), finding a Swan pierced by an arrow, a fetish object; a prelude, Kundry with a young impetuous boy, playing with his archery set, watched on by child-knights, and on into a puppet world, Bayreuth and the first Parsifal. Wagner is there also, but first we pass again by Kundry, asleep with a book open, an etching of the Knights of the Grail at their round table. She has a crown in her lap. She is in white, inky-blue stars around her waist, or perhaps black holes. Absences.

Behind is Wagner’s visage in profile, a death-mask. Here the action shall take place. Behind that is a dead puppet Wagner and Kundry again, and behind that, draped in a cloth, the world and the world tree – Yggdrasl.

More Wagners. The one pounding his baton into a bleeding ear; the one dressed in women’s pink silk attire, again darkness, this time emerging from a padded smoking jacket, the absent body giving it form, and in the depths, stars and night. A pure geometric solid breaks this. A rhomboid upon which a projection hovers. This all shall return, just as the overture’s leitmotifs are played out.

Even from these few minutes, the bottomless depth of this Parsifal is acute. Back through time and space it goes, trapping as in an autopsy all the parts that make a whole. It is perhaps also a judgement. As Wagner himself turns back towards the Germanic romantic history and its imagined form in millennia prehistory – the well-spring of his opera, Syberberg himself from a hundred years after the prémiere turns those years on Wagner. It is a work of love, yet it is never uncritical.

How do I write about such a piece? How do I remember it? I want to say it was for me as an epiphany. I also want to hold this feeling, to not pass it over for the next stimulation. Perhaps to say it is a meditation, a ritual; to go through those hours.

There are two moments when the theme, what this is about, is impossible to misconstrue. The first where Parsifal falls to Kundry in anguish as she tells of her (his mother’s) broken heart waiting for his return. The second at the end, The two Parsifals, male and female – though both so androgynous – come from within the rent crags of Wagner’s profile, regard each other and embrace. It is love.

It is not the confusion of Wagner’s platonic ideal, with its implicit misogyny and homoeroticism, nor of a christian one, burdened with guilt, obligation, and choking threat of punishment. Whether or not the spear Parsifal(Karin) wields closes the wound is perhaps less important than Kundry then lying beside, her last act one of sacrifice that releases the two Parsifals, closes this existential suffering under which all are enslaved. (The Knights no less for their role in perpetuating it, trapped in an endless deathlessness.)

From this, the two Parsifals freed, are able to meet, to see each other. It would be disingenuous as well as mediocre to read this as simply the reunion of male and female, though what this meeting posits, as well as Syberberg’s intention here is difficult to grasp. Perhaps here, the Buddhism which threads through Wagner’s conception of this opera, and which Syberberg never makes so explicit as he does other themes, comes forth. That Martin Kutter’s Parsifal is a beautiful, long-haired boy, feminine and slender, emotional in thought and expression, and Karin Krick’s is boyish, a Joan of Arc warrior in leather, her face blank of expression and emotions the barest flitting to impassivity, certainly undoes this simplistic reading, as well as any interpretation as Freudian familial drama.

As to why Parsifal changes (after the kiss, after “Wie alles schauert, bebt und zuckt – in sündigem Verlangen!…”) is equally elusive, though the overture hints at some possible readings. Nonetheless, she blames Kundry for this fall from salvation.

And Kundry. In the end, the choir sings, “Höchsten Heiles Wunder! Erlösung dem Erlöser!”, as the Parsifals greet each other, we find her lying, now crowned, next to Amfortas, around which all the Grails as they have been represented are accounted for, the world atop Yggdrasl now open and Theater Bayreuth therein, Wagner also nearby in an open libretto, skeletal corpses of the Knights around. The camera pulls back into darkness, emerges from the eye of the iron skull of a bishop in the same water as the overture, crowned and propped up like a macabre edifice, barring permanently any sentimentalism, romanticism the opera’s resolution so seductively and easily gives, and on out, the theatre coming into focus again, embraced in a glass ball by Kundry. She stares unblinking through the final notes until they pass, her eyes grow heavy. Sleep.

Trotzdem … Schokolade! Kuchen! Viel Spaß und Krawall machen!

vera schwarcz – the chinese enlightenment

paul hockenos – joschka fischer

It’s almost 4am, I should be going to sleep but all I want to do is …

Hosni Mubarak resigns as Egypt prez: Video of Tahrir square first reaction

The Egyptian people have toppled Mubarak, an extraordinary moment, but the regime has not been toppled, not yet.
‘This Is Who Egyptians Are’
Iran: Hope, Joy, Envy as Egypt Breaks Free
Egypt: The Vlog before the Revolution
Egypt: The World Rejoices as Mubarak Resigns
Mubarak steps down. Egypt Uprising wins the first round…
Triumph as Mubarak quits
What next for Egypt?
Where does Mubarak go now? [Updated]
Timeline: Egypt unrest
Egypt: The Moment of Triumph
Twitter: #egypt, #jan25

Today I have read a number of articles and blog posts that are high exemplars of thoughtful analysis and to me underscore the brilliance of new media as it has grown in the past several years; individuals who are unabashedly passionate about their fields on interest and recognise the importance of their voices in providing not just a bulwark against the endless mediocrity and often willful disingenuousness of commercial media, but often altruistically providing considered, articulate, educated writing that could exist nowhere else.

Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology today wrote a piece that at its absolute minimum is all this: ‘The last free people on the planet’. It’s over 11000 words (and that’s before even clicking any of the extensive links or further reading), so find a spot in the sun if you’re in Brussels, along with something to drink, take an hour and read this.

Laurence Dreyfus: Wagner and the Erotic Impulse

Nietzsche, yes. Contra Wagner. The overture to the first act, his visage looms over the stage, peering into the darkness of jardin, only the conductor and a pianist. A snake falls. I am one row below the gods, hanging above the glow of the rehearsal desks. Start again. Darkness. The curtain does not rise, but dissolves. More darkness. A glimmer. A forest. Where there is no light, blacker still yet, voices sing.

I have not seen enough – the first act only about half, the third not at all; the second, either drunk in the ropes or off-stage I know best but nonetheless fragmented – to feel I can remark with authority or certainty on what I am experiencing, but I shall say some things anyway. It feels uncertain and elusive. Amidst it, within, there is little to grasp that gives comfort, that assures one’s performance is effective or even has a point or reason. It is difficult to trust.

I imagine a black theatre filled with a thousand people, the uncanny spirit this gives which can be come by through no other means, seeing into this darkness, past Nietzsche, these voices of Gurnemanz, Amfortas, Kundry, coming from the pit of absent light, the storm of the orchestra, the music, Wagner, the forest and what happens therein, it could overwhelm utterly.

We had a run later yesterday with the same piano and baton, white bodies, wigs, the white of the space, the floor, the chasm facing towards the audience also a white haze, difficult for all the new things (the body paint dries the skin and causes the ropes to stick instead of slide, biting into the skin – something we will find a solution for, or just get used to, adapt, work around). It seems not so much goes on, but my camera in the care of one in the audience captured this all, and watching it last night and again today, the scene has something compelling, almost violent.

There is an intellectualism afoot in the mise en scene I think some people will hate, or simply not understand and so feel angry and frustrated. Well, they can always close their eyes and listen to the music and voices. This, I think, is where Roméo is playing out the drama and emotions; not in acting or staging and set. There is perhaps no need to make these additions to this that merely reiterate, to sing of a Zauberschloss and thereafter assemble an entire one across the volume of the stage. And in this space created by dispensing, addressing Wagner and his Parsifal …

Is Wagner’s Parsifal his secret, superior laugh at himself, his triumph at attaining the final, supreme freedom of the artist, his artistic transcendence? As I said, it would be nice to think so: because what would an intentionally serious Parsifal be like? Do we really need to see in him ‘the spawn of an insane hatred of knowledge, mind and sensuality’ (as someone once argued against me)? A curse on the senses and the mind in one breath of hate? An apostasy and return to sickly Christian and obscurantist ideals? And finally an actual self-denial, self-annulment on the part of an artist who had hitherto wanted the opposite with all the force of his will, namely for his art to be the highest intellectualization and sensualization? And not just his art: his life too.

Is this what Roméo plays with, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality? With intellectualisation and sensualisation? I know when the blumenmädchen are singing it is physically affecting, I mean to say, god, it is like sex, and later with Andrew and Anna, and the return of the leitmotif from Act I’s Vorspiel, has such a melancholy and loneliness … or it could just be an accumulation of scraps taken from here and there, starting from Wikipedia, and I’m merely retracing all this here.

Even so, that is not necessarily a disparaging remark, after all, this is how I make work, following traces, and so there comes a substantial familiarity, the process is not superficial nor careless. And when this is repeated over years, it builds like layers of sediment, in which can be found like archaeology.

It is late again though, and tomorrow more whitening and ropes. Today we spent a quiet some hours in the back of Marlibran again working on details of the suspensions. Anna came to visit with her breathing coach, also Anna (we will all change our names to Anna and when Roméo says, “Anna” will all turn towards him, “Yes!?”), to work on her screams. While Gala hung, she was there howling, lying on her back, legs spread.