Memory theatre (opera) in seven parts based on Aeschylus' drama
Premiere performance:
16.05.1993 MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
TheatreWorks, 14 Acland Street, St Kilda 3182
Music by Liza Lim
Text devised by Liza Lim and Barrie Kosky, drawn from Tony Harrison, The Agamemnon, Aeschylus The Oresteia, Sappho The Stars and the Moon
Director's Note
This project came out of a number of discussions and ideas which Liza Lim and I have developed over the last two years. These discussions ranged in subject matter from the nature of contemporary music-theatre to notions of vocal production and theatre rituals. The result is our production of The Oresteia.
We have deliberately avoided a musical setting of the original Greek work which concentrates on a cumulative linear narrative. Rather, imagine that the text, characters and rituals of Aeschylus' work have been embedded beneath the floor of our performance space. This magical and potent force acts as an ‘energy’ that infects the bodies, voices and instruments of the performers, resulting in a collision of possessions and trances that cause fleeting, transitory performance states.
These states derive from a number of sources. Characters or archetypes can scream or howl from the mouth of singers. The banquet becomes a mythic perversion of consumption and expulsion, whereby language and sound are literally chewed, swallowed, vomited and spat out.
The action of murder becomes not one retelling but a fractured and not wholly articulated act of remembrance. Moments, words and fragments of stories are enacted in a space which bristles with the tensions of history, memory and experience.
In our version of the The Oresteia, the relationships between breathing and singing, walking and dancing, language and sound are explored by a weaving of movement, image, music and text. Each element must be seen as affecting another so that what results is not so much an ‘adaptation’ or ‘version’ but something more akin to an aural performance sculpture.
—Barrie Kosky
Composer's Note
The Oresteia as a subject for an opera — The construction of a ‘memory theatre’
The form of The Oresteia project is a greatly compacted vision of particular themes, myths and characters that are found in Aeschylus' drama.
The work takes as its conceptual keynote different notions of ‘memory’. These range from, for example, the functions and behaviour of memory in different psychological states or in brain dysfunction (dreams, insanity, schizophrenia, hysteria, amnesia) to the ideas of rituals as constructions of the collective memory of a society, to Renaissance Hermetic traditions of ‘mnemonics’ (The Art of Memory) and its application in contemporary architectural and art theory. These ideas form a labyrinthine structure through which Aeschylus' characters undergo transformation.
The use of the term ‘memory theatre’ is a recognition that the themes of an ancient Greek drama—Aeschylus' Oresteia—still resonate as strongly as ever in the present. Its myths find many parallels with our contemporary culture: the questions surrounding the relationships between men and women, the rituals attending the cycle of birth, life and death, the destruction wrought by war, the roles of justice enacted on many levels and the individual strivings towards insight and fulfilment continue to be of the utmost importance to us.
Our ‘memory theatre’ is also a realization that the ghosts peopling Aeschylus' drama are not yet at rest: unappeased, their energy unexpended, they call out to us to have a hearing in new contexts. They take part in Aeschylus' 5th century B.C.E. drama but also have prior ‘histories’ (Homer, Mycaenaean myth, even earlier matriarchal religious cults) — one function of our theatre is to strip back Aeschylus' work to reveal something of their earlier existences. In the other direction, our theatre provides a space for them to tell their stories in our presence.
Their stories are not easy ones to tell: they are complex, disturbing, traumatic. Hence, the sounds and techniques by which these stories are given voice are of an equally disturbing nature. A visceral and body-based notion of vocal production, an anatomy of the voice—breathing, sobbing, laughing, whistling in unearthly clamourings and ululations—play an equal part to ‘singing’ in the work's excavation of the boundaries of articulacy and inarticulacy.
Drawing upon Aeschylus' Greek text, the elegaic poetry of Sappho and the hypnotic and rhythmic lines of Tony Harrison's English translation of Agamemnon, the presences of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Cassandra, Orestes, Electra, a herald, the Furies, Apollo and Athena engage in a complex and multi-faceted reading of their parts in The Oresteia.
Remembering and forgetting, dreaming and prophesying, they might also challenge us to reflect on our own journeyings through the interior and exterior landscapes of human existence.
Performers
Sandro Gorli | conductor
Jeannie van de Velde | soprano
Julie Edwardson | mezzo-soprano
Deborah Kayser | mezzo-soprano
Andrew Muscat-Clark | male soprano
Tyrone Landau | tenor
Grant Smith | baritone
Paula Rae | piccolo+alto flute
Jane Robertson | clarinet+bass clarinet
Stephen Robinson | oboe+cor anglais
Andrew Evans | trumpet+piccolo trumpet
Brett Kelly | trombone
Cassandra Azzaro | Turkish baglama saz
Daryl Buckley | electric guitar
Jennifer Curl | viola+viola d'amore
Rosanne Hunt | violoncello
Joan Wright | contrabass
Peter Neville | percussion
Production
Barrie Kosky | director
Peter Corrigan | designer
Shelley Lasica | choreographer
Robert Lehrer | lighting designer+production manager
Elizabeth Keen | stage manager
Ian McLay | set construction
Daryl Buckley | project manager
Louise Godwin | publicity
"…Lim's term ‘memory theatre’ is a metaphor for the way in which the Aeschylus drama informs the piece, without recourse to plot or distinct characterisation … The image of the sin ingested and then vomited and spat out prompts a convulsive, visceral vocal style, creating a new and specialised vocal vocabulary based on the individual abilities of the singers … Lim's music here is full of iridescent and varied originality and wonderfully imaginative scoring … something new and fresh has been created."
—Peter McCallum, Sydney Morning Herald
The Oresteia has been recorded by ELISION Ensemble with the original cast, and is available on compact disc. This recording won the 1996 Sounds Australian award for Best CD by an Australian Ensemble.
The Oresteia was commissioned by ELISION Ensemble and Treason of Images and supported in its writing, production, development and recording by grants from the Performing Arts Board of the Australia Council and Arts Victoria.
