“A Murmuration of Puppets”
Not long before I left my house to see Symphonie Fantastique at the HERE Arts Center I happened to watch a
brief video on Facebook showing a flock of countless starlings—a murmuration of
them, to be precise—creating one beautiful cloud-like pattern after the other
before they finally settled down to roost.
Symphonie Fantastique,
puppet master Basil Twist’s unusual project in which a team of puppeteers moves
objects about in a tank of water to the accompaniment of a musical score,
creates a somewhat similar effect. Instead of a mysterious natural phenomenon,
Twist provides a remarkably well-crafted artistic creation. It also happens to
be—I hate to say it—dramatically dull.
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| Christopher O'Riley. Photo: Richard Termine. |
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| Photo: Richard Termine. |
In Symphonie Fantastique,
a work the now 48-year-old Twist devised after taking home and mending a
discarded aquarium, we discover how a variety of fabrics, feathers, and
other items can be put to aesthetic use when manipulated under water,
beautifully lit, and accompanied by powerful music. Twist has a very broad
interpretation of puppetry, considering anything that can be made to seem
organic or lifelike as grist for his mill. In Symphonie Fantastique nothing resembles humans or animals—although
it’s easy to imagine fish, eels, or even underwater vegetation. See here for a preview.
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| Photo: Richard Termine. |
The music accompanying the puppetry is Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, an 1830
composition inspired by Berlioz’s passion for an English actress he
had seen on stage in Paris. The composition has been transcribed for a single
pianist, Christopher O’Riley, who sits downstage right, with just enough light
to read the score, while the stage area itself reveals what could easily be
taken for a large, flat-screen TV. Actually, it’s one side of a 1,000 gallon
tank of water, its perimeter completely masked.
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| Photo: Richard Termine. |
Each of the five movements in Berlioz’s composition is
preceded and concluded by the rise and descent of an artificial, red tab curtain. As O’Riley
offers his virtuosic performance, a team of five invisible puppeteers in wet
suits cause numerous shapes to float, dance, twirl, circle, leap, and sway
within the tank, all of it jolted to life under Andrew Hill’s magnificent panoply
of lighting effects. Even the water dances, as multiple spouts conspire to
mingle jets of spray and bubbles with the ever-changing objects.
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| Photo: Richard Termine. |
While there’s nothing especially funny in any of this, the
audience laughed loudly during the breaks between movements. Presumably, this
was in response to humorous behavior by the pianist, hidden from me by the bushy-headed
man in front of me, who was either Oskar Eustis or his doppelganger.
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| Photo: Richard Termine. |
At the end of the show, the audience is invited backstage
for a fascinating glimpse of the technical apparatus that produced what they’ve
just witnessed. There, walking on the wet floor among lighting cables, they’ll
squeeze through a narrow space filled with technicians, puppeteers, fellow
audience members, and the many props used in the performance.
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| Photo: Richard Termine. |
Despite there actually being a written story or “program”
written by Berlioz to help follow his music, Twist eschews it. In his “creator’s
note,” he declares: “I want the audience to enjoy the music and the visuals for
what they are. I feel Berlioz would agree with me. Later in his life, Berlioz
wrote there was no need to provide the written program. . . . He insisted that the music stood on its own.”
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| Photo: Richard Termine. |
So, essentially, Symphonie
Fantastique is either a piano concert accompanied by charmingly choreographed,
abstract images, or vice-versa. Some will search for hints of a narrative
context in the swirling, twisting shapes, perhaps even anthropomorphizing what
they see—could those two red feathers be lovers? Is that white shape the woman
Berlioz yearned for? Otherwise, they’ll simply appreciate the experience as a
pleasant way to pass 55 minutes without having to think at all.
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| Photo: Richard Termine. |
Twist finds inspiration in the ideas of Russian
artist/musician Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), who decried the 19th century’s
preoccupation with material phenomena at the expense of life’s “inner sphere,”
or “cosmic element,” which he considered especially lacking in drama, opera, and ballet.
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| Photo: Richard Termine. |
In his search for artistic expression beyond the bounds of
realistic representation, Kandinsky sought answers in synesthesia, “that
interdependence of the sense from which some gather the impression of ‘seeing’
sounds in terms of colour, or hearing colours as sounds,” as Richard Drain
explains it. In Symphonie Fantastique Twist
also seems to be attempting the production in the spectator of what Kandinsky
called a “spiritual vibration,” free from the need to represent the outside
world.
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| Christopher O'Riley. Photo: Richard Termine. |
To me, though, the most immediate predecessor of what Twist
accomplishes is the first selection in Walt Disney’s astonishing Fantasia (1940), the segment in which a
world of exquisite abstract images accompanies an orchestral rendition of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in
D Minor.” As its name suggests, Fantasia
is itself a Symphonie Fantastique. It is, however, by no means a drame fantastique.
OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave., NYC
Through May 31