MIAF 2008
The NavigatorMelbourne International Arts Festival and Brisbane Arts Festival
9 October 2008
Playhouse, the Arts Centre
It wouldn’t be the opening night of the Melbourne International Arts Festival without walkouts and disgruntled mumblings. Liza Lim’s new opera The Navigator is already eliciting extreme reactions.
At Thursday afternoon’s In Conversation, Kristy Edmunds and Robyn Archer discussed the unique role that Australian festivals play in enabling the creation of new work, supporting authentic voices and giving artists the freedom to create without the pressure of a known outcome. The Navigator is a product of the direct support of MIAF and the Brisbane Festival. Whether you choose to embrace or reject this outcome, it would never have existed without festival support.
Composer Liza Lim’s international demand far surpasses her local reputation. Archer describes her as Australia’s most important composer. I didn’t know about her, but I so want to hear more.
Lim’s composition is filled with unexpected contradictions and extremes. Like a child learning how to communicate, she plays with the myriad of sounds a human voice can make. Combining coloratura soprano (Talse Trevigne), baroque alto (Deborah Kayser), counter tenor (Andrew Watts), baritone (Omar Ebrahim) and bass baritone (Philip Larson) is already an unusual choice, but each also contradicts their own voice with squeals, grunts, barks and clicks. Don’t expect to be humming the tunes on the way home.
Patricia Sykes libretto embraces the extremity of the music and lets her language and words joyously produce new sounds and images of their own. Poetry like, “Embracing skeletons freeze and chime like beautiful relics”, force you to question the non-skeletal images and the non-chiming sounds.
Director Barrie Kosky has never been afraid to experience, explore and show us the new or the extreme. His controlled direction is terribly over-indulgent, but exquisite. There is no defining line between composition, direction, design and performance. All combine to create sumptuous, luscious and often absurd images that are designed to produce emotional and visceral responses.
Perhaps this is why people left. Maybe their responses were so extreme that they couldn’t bear the emotion any longer. Or maybe they just didn’t like it.
I do wonder about the resistance to laugh and enjoy Kosky’s images. Is it the residual notion that opera is serious high art that is only meant to be admired? I enjoyed the absurdity of his images. Surely, the extra-sparklie gold lamé curtain, the fat bloke covered with butterflies, and the Fool/clown masturbating his over-sized penis, are meant to be a little bit funny!
The Navigator is not – and is not meant to be – for all tastes. It’s challenging, confronting and disorienting. I’m still not sure what it was about (and not completely sure if I liked it), but I was never bored, always fascinated and continually questioning and wondering about what I was experiencing. I wish I could feel like that in every show, and am so glad that they had the support to create such a work.
This review appeared on AussieThearte.com
