One of the most highly anticipated events of the Taiwan International Festival (台灣國際藝術節), Book of Longing, a song cycle by Philip Glass based on the 2006 book of the same name by artist Leonard Cohen, opened to a full house at the National Concert Hall in Taipei on Saturday.
The audience ranged widely over age and style of dress, suggesting that this collaboration between two highly unconventional artists had managed to appeal widely across the social spectrum. Although Leonard Cohen was not himself among the performers, his voice and his words were a powerful aspect of the diverse and not-easily categorizable musical program.
The performance is subtitled “A New Work by Philip Glass Based on the Poetry and Images of Leonard Cohen,” and it would have been nice if the images could have played a larger part, or simply been larger. As it was, Cohen’s wonderful images seemed merely to accessorize the musical presentation, in a slideshow rather unimaginatively enlivened with various computer effects.
This is the only complaint that can be made of a production that was in every other respect outstanding. Apart from the music itself, there was an elegance and urbanity of the musicians and singers that would have done Cohen the ladies’ man proud. The performers were certainly as important as the music, with individual musicians coming forward for solos at different points in the program, drawing the audience in not just with the sound, but with their physical presence as well. A solo by cellist Wendy Sutter was particularly captivating.
The four singers, Dominique Plaisant, soprano, Tara Hugo, mezzo, Will Erat, tenor and Damiel Keeling, bass, wandered on and off stage in an apparently haphazard manner, and through simple movements and interaction provided a minimalist dramatic backdrop for the concert.
Philip Glass’ Book of Longing provides an aural complexity that works effectively against the ambiguities and swoops from transcendent speculation about life and love to the banalities and discomfort of the same in Cohen’s poetry. The production might have been made a tad more accessible, both for Taiwanese and foreign audiences, by the presence of subtitles, even if these were just the English text. Cohen’s poetry is at turns dense and rambling, and a readable text, above or at either side of the stage, would have been an aid to comprehension for those unable to pick up all the words amid the musical setting. But the audience on Saturday certainly seemed to feel it had got its money’s worth simply from the presence of the great musical maestro in Taipei.
Compania Nacional de Danza’s production of Alas opens with a black-clad angel slowly climbing down a cubist tower to join the humans on earth, and ends with the humans climbing the tower to heaven while Damiel, the fallen angel, writhes in a pool of water on the floor.
In between there were some heavenly passages and duets, lyrical and light, a lot of running, and one hellish sequence with men in black leather kilts, women in black leggings and bandeau tops, lots of boots, and a harsh electronic score. However, the 70-minute ballet seemed to pass in no time at all and at the end, I remembered the good parts, not the bad.
Since my Spanish never got much beyond the “Donde esta la biblioteca?” stage and my Chinese reading is not up to Peter Handke’s metaphysical musings in his screenplay for Wim Wenders Wings of Desire, I felt free to concentrate on the dancers and the staging and ignore both the whisperings of artistic director and choreographer Nacho Duato as Damiel and the Chinese translations on either side of the stage.
For the most part Alas worked. The staging was minimal and the lighting frequently organic, with dim glows coming from stage right so that the shadows of the dancers were projected onto the large screen at stage left. The water ballet at the end was beautiful, especially the unintended reflection of the water onto the ceiling of the National Theater, which made looking up give you the feeling that heaven and earth had been reversed.
While Damiel was sans wings, costume designer Angelina Atlagic thoughtfully left large slits in the back of his coat (and his T-shirt) where wings could have been attached. But while Duato amply conveyed the physical struggles of a heavenly creature torn by his desire for mortality, the reasons for this desire were less clear. In the film, Damiel wanted to join the woman he loved. In Alas, the woman appeared to be an afterthought.
I had expected some grand pas de deux. What you got was Damiel as a watcher, not a doer.
The 52-year old Duato, however, has retained the suppleness he was famed for in his younger days, and while I’m sure he could tell the difference, there were probably few in the audience on Saturday who would have been able to discern his age from the way he danced.
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