Opera Erratica at Spitalfields Winter Music Festival on Tuesday night (11th December) – and I was feeling decidedly underdressed. No, it wasn’t because I was at ‘posh opera’ and I should have put on a white tie or some other moth-balled nonsense, No, it was just the intense cold walking there, one of those rare evenings in London when the ice crystals sparkle on the street pavements.
Inside the Hoxton Hall: a group of five singers from Ex Audi stand behind the stage. There are no other musicians, all the singers have perfect pitch and they sing unaccompanied – nine superficially unrelated pieces which are sung uninterupted one after the other. Most of the songs are modern (Salvatore Sciarrino, Christopher Fox and James Weeks), but there are also some songs by Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613) – “far reaches of chromatic harmony… into a musical realm beyond that of his contemporaries… a music of existential isolation” (the programme notes describe).
On stage behind a see-through screen a middle-aged man and woman appear. They don’t speak, but they bring with them two wooden boxes with lids which they place on a table at the front of the stage, and then open them. The first song has begun already, and then a long naked arm appears out of one of the boxes stretching upwards towards the ceiling.
And then a small naked male figure emerges from the other box. And then another naked women from the first box. And then the same figures appear again and again through the different songs, but in different guises, sometimes clothed, sometimes naked. And then a third woman appears. She is always the same, naked apart from her white underpants. Sometimes the three people are involved in unfolding events together. Sometimes they are alone. The midle-aged man and woman appear to see them sometimes, and react with each other. Sometimes their faces express an emotion, perhaps it is a memory, but at other times it appears like chaos. There is no other sound apart from the singing.
We know of course that the three figures coming out of the boxes are not real. It is an effect called Pepper’s Ghost illusions. The show (which lasts about an hour) has been created by Patrick Eakin Young – from a time when he was living in a foreign country and he didn’t have any actors he could use…
… to explore the issues which interest him of “loss and memory, the frustrating complexity of communication, and the projection and perception of the self”.
We know of course that the figures are not real, but we cannot help but enter fully into the life of the play, and the songspiel of harmonies takes us deeper and deeper in. I even feel my eyelids starting to flutter shut towards the end.