The second part Caesarean Section/Essays on Suicide, which takes the audience into the Barbican’s Pit Theatre, is enormously different. The combination of this music, Polish Catholicism, and the rough wooden stage on which sinewy figures contort in candlelight, or shovel earth in the darkness, is heady and powerful in the extreme. Trade routes and religions cutting swathes through cultures. It’s music that sounds ineffable and ancient, and yet within it you can hear the shifting of tribes, borders and empires across the mainland. There is a starkness about it, accentuated by the almost Middle-Eastern harsh edge to the women’s voices. It is beautiful and serious monastic conjuring, inside the plain Protestant interior of St Giles’s, a medieval middle-Europe. The music is solemn Catholic or Orthodox polyphonic chant. The first piece Gospels of Childhood/The Overture, presented in St Giles’s Church across the pond from the Barbican’s non-Silk Street entrance, is a sung-through meditation on religious themes accompanied by dark, elliptical, visual theatre. Teatr ZAR’s Gospels of Childhood is a triptych of pieces which may well challenge some people’s ideas of what teatr is.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |