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Wagner Society in NSW Inc
by Katie French For those for whom Tristan and Isolde represents Wagner's masterpiece, the recent showing of segments of American video artist Bill Viola's Tristan Project were an aesthetic treat not to be missed. Originally created in 2005 in collaboration with Peter Sellars (of Adelaide Festival notoriety), The Tristan Project as a whole, was conceived as a four hour backdrop to Sellar's production of Tristan and Isolde . Only three short extracts have been shown here, each of about ten minutes in length – The Fall Into Paradise at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Fire Woman and Tristan's Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall) against a huge screen on the altar wall of the wonderfully atmospheric, medieval-inspired St Saviour's Church in Redfern. Each of these works powerfully combines light and darkness, silence and sound, endless stillness and sometimes shocking movement, in a suspense-filled, erotically charged, bold embodiment of the moods of several dramatic segments of Wagner's opera. The perversely entitled The Fall Into Paradise commences with a tiny speck of light emerging with agonizing slowness from a pitch-black environment. Ever so slowly, so that the audience becomes vitally aware of the portentous significance of the concepts of Time – of timelessness, of change and changelessness over time, of being outside time – the speck expands and evolves into a male and female form, filmed from above. They revolve slowly, encircling each other until, with shocking, passionate force and an explosion of water, they are conjoined and propelled downward – or, disorientingly, it could be upward! – into a sea-blue paradise, a sapphire other-world of bubbles, of merging, interwoven, enthralled limbs and hair, and waves of fabric, all silhouetted against the light. The enraptured pair, oblivious within their roaring bubble chamber, are out of this world. They are suspended, drowning in timelessness, in the shared rapture of Wagner's ‘fatal pair'. Fire Woman engulfs viewers seated in the unnervingly darkened pews of St Saviour's in a ceiling-high wall of thundering, soaring flames. In stark silhouette, an immobile figure, robed and cowled, confronts a relentless, blazing inferno for what seems like an eternity of waiting. Then with the same shocking suddenness of the lovers' plunge into Paradise , she raises her arms to form a silhouetted human crucifix. It is an appalling, hair-raising moment as it seems certain she will plunge into the hypnotic flames, but she defies expectations by catapulting backward into an unseen mass of water, propelling waves of petrol blue into the ferocious orange flames. The viewer endures the relentless intensity of the flames, the same ‘ravaging, fiery torment which consumes' Tristan, that same shocking, roaring fire of ‘day's wild passion'. Tristan's own words from the opera become all the more poignant as he deliriously cries: ‘Ah Isolde, when ah when will you quench the flame/ that it may announce me to my happiness.' The third extract, Tristan's Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall) opens subtly, with a sense of quiet and peace - Tristan's yearned for ‘peace of death'. Tristan's body lies on a grey granite slab in a winding sheet of white silk. The only sounds are the interminable dripping of water from the heights above the corpse. But the relief is temporary. Inevitably over extended time, the drips develop into a trickle, into a torrent, into a raging deluge, swelling and roaring to an almost unbearable intensity. With the surging, submerging swell, the body appears to levitate, not on a horizontal plane, but from the chest with the neck laid bare, as though Tristan were releasing himself as an offering, achieving his own liberation from the world, his yearned for annihilation. Here he is the Tristan of Isolde's Liebestod , ‘soaring on high, stars sparkling around him,' his heart proudly swelling, in a time outside Time, in the oblivion of supreme bliss. These extracts from LOVE/DEATH: The Tristan Project are three powerful and evocative contemporary works of art. They combine the seductive power of those elemental forces of fire, of water and earthliness with the elemental power and destructive forces of passionate love. Viewers are engulfed by these powers, suspended outside time for the length of the piece – then liberated back into real-world time, exhausted. For those who feel inspired to see more of Viola's work, his web site is: www.billviola.com . See also Article by Terence Watson
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