Presented by Gotham Chamber Opera
featuring members of Armitage Gone! Dance

May 2008
The Playhouse, Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street, NYC

Read press reviews of this production.

credits

Conductor Neal Goren
Production Karole Armitage
Scenic Design Vera Lutter
Costume Design Peter Speliopoulos
Lighting Design Clifton Taylor
Make-Up & Hair Design Hagen Linss

CAST
Ariadne Emily Langford Johnson/Brenda Patterson

conductor's notes
A song is a mini-drama, and over the years, accompanying many of the world's great singers in recital, I have been fascinated by the charge that results when two such mini-dramas meet side by side. Sometimes the charge is negligible, as when two similar songs by the same composer are performed in sequence. Or the charge can be greater, when songs of differing moods by the same composer follow one another. But juxtapose songs by different composers and the charge can turn into a jolt, or even a shock. The reordering of a single song within a recital can change the emotional architecture completely.

If we think of songs (or even symphonic movements) as individual psychodramas, the ordering and amassing of these discrete events in an evening can produce a sensation of organized schizophrenia. The liminal time between selections can be experienced as moments of grateful repose or be fraught with anticipation and uncertainty. It’s the latter sensation we aim for in our current program.

Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna (1608), Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos (1789), and Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1912) are cris de coeur from three different eras, all expressed by one woman in extremis. By intertwining the psychodramas, we offer Ariadne’s ever-shifting hysteria as one evolving story. The abrupt fluctuations in musical and verbal language are the outward manifestations of that hysteria, a result of her all-consuming love and subsequent all-consuming loss. While the three composers expressed these emotions with differing means in different centuries, there is an underlying unity of expressive impulse.

In the Haydn (performed with his original piano accompaniment), Ariadne relives the entire arc of her relationship with Theseus. The Monteverdi (featuring the original theorbo accompaniment) focuses on Ariadne at the moment of her abandonment. Schoenberg presents an aptly 20th-century character tormented by inner demons. All three use vocal writing to express the extremes of emotion that characterize hysteria.

The body in motion is another instrument of expression, equal to that of the human voice. We interpret a single dancer as expressing individual emotions, but adding additional dancers into the picture can produce the same kind of charge as when two contrasting songs come into contact. In fashioning this season for Gotham Chamber Opera, I sought to explore whether such musical charges, combined with the physical and visual charges provided by dancers, would result in an exponentially expressive experience. With our three Ariadnes, Karole and I have taken that idea to its (perhaps) logical extreme: not just an operatic evening or an evening of dance, but a songdance of a woman psychologically unhinged. - Neal Goren

producer's notes
Baroque opera often tells the story of a struggle in which a character comes to grips with disaster: betrayal, perhaps, or the death of a beloved. In twentieth century works there is usually a built-in Freudian assumption that we are psychological creatures with complex lives hidden beneath the surface. So the challenge in directing Ariadne Unhinged was to make the music and psychology of disparate eras come together as a cohesive whole. My solution is contemporary: Ariadne is someone searching to find equilibrium after a great personal trauma. The staging unveils her mental processes rather than a dramatic situation. This approach allows me to shift back and forth, keeping the focus on her internal experience rather than the world around her.

Each piece of music plays a distinct role. Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna provides the frame: Ariadne has been abandoned by her lover, Teseo. She is seen alone; she looks inside. Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire unleashes the pent-up secrets hidden in the lament. Dancers portray the psychic debris of her distress: her anger, her desperation, her yearning, her confusion. And Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos gives us Ariadne’s fantasy in the form of a dancer double. A solo aria on the page becomes a love duet between dancers onstage, even though it takes place entirely within her mind.

But dance is not reserved for dancers. At times, both dancer and singer make the same gesture, the dancer using the full body and the singer doing a minimal version that captures its essence. In this way the audience sees two perspectives on the same situation, or the current self and its memory. At other times, the singer’s body is carefully molded – the angle of her head, the way she plants her feet, the tension or lack of it in the hand – to make the internal life of the character visible. We are not told what she is feeling, but experience it directly.

Vera Lutter’s set design is similarly a portrait of Ariadne below the surface. Her photograph, in which negative and positive are reversed, powerfully captures Ariadne’s feeling of a world out of joint. Likewise, Peter Speliopoulos’s costumes capture the relationship of the internal to the external: in Pierrot Lunaire the dancers are dressed like bits of dust or debris and Ariadne’s dress has a beautiful surface that is crumpled and shattered. Together, the design, dance, music, song, and light aim to create a portrait of a woman struggling at all levels to make sense of her world. - Karole Armitage