THE WARDROBE LIVES !
Part 2 of 2 about the performance "The Goddess Was a Shapeless Mass"
If you remember, last time I wrote about the first part of the performance The Goddess Was a Shapeless Mass”. You need to read the first part for this post to make sense. You can read it here:
You might now be able to see all of this post in your e-mail. Click “View entire message” to get the whole thing.
And so we will continue to talk about HER:
The concert hall was build in 1945 with light wood types like teak and birch. The seats are of ox leather. It’s a very special room, entering it is like stepping into one big lung. As soon as I knew we were going to end with Stravinskijs Firebird. I knew that I wanted the put a wardrobe in the same wood type on stage.
I wanted the bombastic, romantic finale of Firebird to center a non-human object, I wanted to try to see, if we could manage to install an object onstage, just standing there, still charged with some lifeform, as if the music was about this object! I had an image very early on of a wardrobe standing alone on stage.
I wanted the stone of Cyprus to talk to the wardrobe. The wardrobe came to me intuitively, but analysing my own impulses I understood, that
It needed it to be an domestic object, well-known by everyone - a piece of furniture.
It needed to be big enough to be recognized from afar, and not so small that it became crushed by the grandeur of the stage.
It realized the wardrobe was a copy or a mirroring of the concert hall. The concert hall was a huge teak closet.
These kinds of teak closets are very common in Denmark, people all know them.
It HAD to be a wardrobe that had been in use. No new wardrobes. Preferably a wardrobe that was older than myself (we managed to find one). It needed that feel, touched by human hands.
Before the show even started, we began the transformation of the closet.
I was inspired by this work by Man Ray:
I wanted to use everyday materials, that one would use moving furniture, we settled on these blankets and shiny, blue plastic rope:
Now we had made the closet into somekind of shapeless mass (as the the stone, the goddess in the first part). Here it is at rehearsals, the first time I saw it on stage:
I knew I wanted the performancers to dance around the wardrobe, to somehow worship it. I installed several secrets into the wardrobe (read about secrets in the first part!) On the back of the closet I wrote a protective spell. Nobody saw this. I doubt even the performers noticed.
To make it easier to dress and undress the wardrobe I sewed a huge cross-shaped blanket. On the reverse side a sewed little gifts and secrets for the performancers to find. Small handkerchiefs and old bobbin lace, little plast crystals. I had natural dyed some organza silk with Sct. Johs Wort, and I made these big pockets of silk and filled them with dried lavender, and sewed them onto the reverse side in different places. When we dressed the wardrobe, we made sure that these lavender pockets would sit in strategic places, where the performers would be near them.
Now when I asked the performers to worship and engage with the closet, I could tell them: smell it, examine it with your nose.
In our (albeit short) rehearsal time, to my surprise the performers developed a sensual, dare I say erotic, VERY HOT relationship to the wardrobe. They came to feel ownership over different “parts” of the wardrobe, they named their time with the closet a “make out session”, that talked about impregnating it.
We rolled the closet onto the stage during intermission. But it was not a wardrobe then, it was a secrets compartment for everyone to project their own images on. I found it very ticklish that from the floor seats it would block the view of the conductor.
Orchestra and conductor entered after intermission. I walked out on the stage to stand in front of the wardrobe.
Music began again. They played Mazzolis Orpheus Undone pt 2. I had made a little choreography so me and the performers would walk up and down on both sides of the orchestra, blessing them, as if we were the air in two lungs, going up and down. In this choreography I slipped out of a door in the back changing places with the soprano. From here I ran up to the light booth.
It was very important for me to be part of the performance, but at some point to disappear completely. In magical activities, I find my goal is always to initiate the ritual, help it grow, and at some point to step away from it and let it whirl and wave in its own rhythm letting the participants inhabit it and make it theirs.
Meanwhile the music transitioned into Strozzi's Che si puo fara and Marlene Metzger, the soprano, began to sing with the performers sprawled at her feet.
We transitioned into a short piece of Hildegard Von Bingen, O rubor sanguinis, with only Marlenes voice and a low drone from the double basses. The room feel completely dark and we again projected the stone on the organ.
In the dark my three wonderful priestesses took the position of the carmelite nuns when they take their wows. Lying around the shapeless mass for 4 minutes, while the first parts of Firebird began.
Now began what we have previously named CUDDLING SESSION.
I recorded this video from the light booth, just with my phone:
Around 17 minutes into the Firebird the priestesses undressed the wardrobe. I was very surprised by the feeling in the room, I think the priestesses were too. I think we perhaps had anticipated somekind of displaced laughter, disappointment perhaps og disapproval, confusion? We had spent the last 20 minutes in intense charging of the shapeless mass and now the reveal was that it was just a wardrobe. But it was is if the release of the reveal never came. The audience was still holding its breath, waiting, in complete seriousness. I crouched unter the light booth biting my fist. I was so incredibly nervous. I can’t say exactly why. My guess is that it was because I was really risking something. Having some women lye around a soprano in a nice image, thats FINE, that’s DANDY, that’s not dangerous. But now doing this, charging this secret object to reveal it was just a closet. It felt CRAZY. It also was exactly what I wanted. What I BELIEVE. To give the non-human object this space, this adoration, to make all the dramatic, swelling music to be about FURNITURE. The deep tenderness for the object. And through the tenderness for the object af deep tenderness for the material world, our ecology.
Several, I mean MULTIPLE times, people had asked: Shouldnt’ somebody come out of the wardrobe (My priestess NEVER asked). And afterwards audience members would repeat it: I thought you were coming out of the wardrobe. But no, that was a misunderstanding. You can never open the closet. That is the whole thing. There is a secret in there, and you know it only as a secret. That is how it is. I thought about Kafkas’ note to his publisher regarding the cover art for Metamorphosis: Never show the insect. You can never show the insect. Yes, yes, this is it. We need you to experience the being without your eyes, we cannot believe our eyes anymore, we must re-sharpen other ways of cognition. Music teaches this. We know this, everyone. Why did we not just project the text and video of the piece on a screen? It would’ve been much easier to read, and see, to control. Several people wondered. But I’m sick of screens. I’m so tired of 2-dimensional. I wanted the projection to yield to the bulging surface of the organ, become almost impossible to read, I wanted the 2D projection to SUCCUMB to the material, to the tactile structures of the instrument. I wanted to install on stage, that which cannot be said, cannot be seen, cannot be known even. And still we know it? How is this possible? A closed closet door.
And so, the woman began to dance, to cuddle, to touch, again, as before, the wardrobe, but this time, it was not a secret, it was a wardrobe.
But through their touching, their insistence, the intensity of the music, and the rotating Cyprus stone once more projected above the wardrobe, perhaps this piece of furniture became holy. Then our friends, the priestesses left, quietly and for the finale, the last suite just the wardrobe and this:
At this point I was not in my right mind to take any photographs or anything, so I do not have an image of my favourite moment of the whole thing. But I did manage to film this from rehearsals, look at the first violinist go:
Then it was all over. We took our applause etc. We had some drinks, we celebrated. Then it was time to clean up. The philharmonic had told us they could not take care of the closet, that we needed to get rid of it on the night of. Mette K, who was part of the team, lived close by. She suggested we roll the wardrobe (it was on wheels) to the garbage shed in her courtyard. And so we did one last ritual with our shapeless mass:
Rolling the wardrobe past the busstop outside of the concert hall, some members of the audience recognized us in the winter darkness and I yelled: THE WARDROBE LIVES!