OPERATION:ORFEO / 1993 / 2007 / 2021

OPERATION:ORFEO

A Visual Opera in Three Movements

1993 - 2007 - 2021

RESTAGING PARTICIPANTS (2021)

Conductor Kaspars Putnins
Solo singer Ieva Parša
Solo dancer Lisbeth Sonne Andersen
Vocal ensemble Latvian Radio Choir

Concept, direction Kirsten Dehlholm
Libretto Ib Michael
Music, composition & arrangement Bo Holten
Music, excerpts John Cage, Christoph Willibald Gluck
Set design Maja Ravn
Light design Jesper Kongshaug
Costumes Annette Meyer
Sound design Kristian Hverring
Choreography for solo dancer Anita Saij

Producer Lisbeth Jacobi
Production manager Jānis Liniņš
Light engineer Oskars Plataiskalns
Sound engineer Kristian Hverring
AV engineer Uģis Ezerietis
Stage manager Girts Zvirbulis
Props assistant Alisa Rūta Stravinskaitė

Manager Ulla Katrine Friis

RESTAGING PARTICIPANTS (2007)

Conductor Kaspars Putnins
Solo singer Baiba Berke
Solo dancer Lisbeth Sonne Andersen
Vocal ensemble Latvian Radio Choir

Concept, direction Kirsten Dehlholm
Music, composition & arrangement Bo Holten
Music, excerpts John Cage, Christoph Willibald Gluck
Libretto Ib Michael
Set design & light concept Maja Ravn
Light design & light concept Jesper Kongshaug
Costumes Annette Meyer
Choreography for solo dancer Anita Saij
Sound design Anders Jørgensen
Dramaturgy Claus Lynge

The re-staging in 2007 is co-produced by Latvian National Opera, Latvian Radio Choir and Hotel Pro Forma and is supported by the Danish Committee for the Performing Arts and the Bikuben Foundation.

PARTICIPANTS (1993 - 2001)

Conductor Bo Holten
Solo singer Agnethe Christensen
Solo dancer Ninna Steen
Vocal ensemble Ars Nova / Musica Ficta

Commisioned and co-produced by Århus Festival Week 1993.

Press

Reviews

Dernieres Nouvelles d'Alsace (FR) - 2007 The Danish theatre company Hotel Pro Forma dematerialises the myth of Orpheus to the point of abstraction. A pure object of contemplation. All that is left is the essence: staggering music and breathtaking beauty. - Jean-Michel Lahire Read the full review here The Independent Riga (LV) - 2007 Operation : Orfeo demonstrates the metamorphosis of opera in the 21st century in its most positive way. The performance is transformed by the Latvian Radio Choir into a manifesto of the most powerful musical instrument – the human voice. The Danish dancer Lisbeth Sonne Andersen sculpts her fluid motions. Operation : Orfeo is a world class show. - Laima Mellena Read the full review here Sidney Morning Herald (AU) - 1998 This gut-wrenching beautiful work… teases out key elements of an ancient story, elaborating them into hypnotic patterns based on the true irreducible fundamentals of the theatrical process: bodies moving in time and space…It is a great work of art which renders the critic useless…Without a doubt one of the greatest experiences I have ever had in the theatre. - James Waites Read the full review here Le Soir (FR) - 1995 An intelligent and fascinating delirium of mysterious beauty. With the myth of Orpheus, Hotel Pro Forma has arranged the essential. It is a stringent construction created by a magnificent optical concept which transforms and occasionally reduces the room to a complete two-dimensional space…These Danes are unsurpassed. - Michèle Friche and Jean-Marie Wynants Read the full review here Excerpts of reviews

Program text

Operation : Orfeo is performance as ritual. Based on the myth of Orpheus and Euridice it is composed as a scenic sequence of images with formalised movements drawn through light and supported by symphonic singing. The performance is absorbed in oppositions: darkness and light, life and death, sound and silence. As a visual opera the performance explores deeper evocations of the ancient myth in its inevitably emergent associations of preconscious forms. As the myth is well known the storyline has no need to be told in detail, but may well serve as a dramaturgic course. Operation : Orfeo is divided into three parts. Darkness prevails in the first part and refers to the descent of Orpheus. From the dim clair-obscur of the second part persons appear and recall the ascent of Orpheus. Strong light emerges when the third part begins and reflects the loss of Euridice as a memory laid bare. A sequence of images follow, an interchange between the total illusion of two-dimensional plane and three-dimensional depth. The set’s framing both bounds the finite and is the gateway to the infinite. Within this frame usual modes of seeing and perceiving are suspended or displaced. The perspective switch is in co-existing forms between that of a giant canvas and one of monumental depth. The tiniest items can be seen with the clarity of magnification, but are dwarfed by the whole. The known and the unknown are brought into new alignments to create poetic assonance - devoid of purposeful meaning in its statement, yet filled with meaning in its experience. Throughout, the performers themselves transform the composition of space as they move like elements of an animated painting or sculpture. The minimalist actions of the singers carefully relate to the music but do not interpret it. Thus the two different languages of movement and music communicate in a subtle way without illustrating each other. The lone dancer is the only figure who may be seen to represent the narrative of the myth, though she cannot be taken to represent any particular character - she could be Orpheus, and she could be Euridice. She could indeed be the storyteller herself. Like the visual elements, the music creates a play of difference through oppositions that entice and illuminate each other: the tenuous and the voluminous, the sporadic and the unifying, the soloist and the chorus. The minimalism of John Cage is staged in a full-blooded choral, while the music by Bo Holten, inspired by the Renaissance choir and specifically composed for this production, is lush and redolent. The famous aria Che faro sensa Euridyce from Gluck´s opera Orpheus and Euridice appears as a classical quotation, an icon, a remembrance. The cast consists of twelve singers, a mezzo soprano soloist, a solo dancer and the conductor.

Libretto

Extracts from the libretto by Ib Michael (Translated by Barbara Haveland). This libretto comprises two texts by Ib Michael: The indented passages are taken from his collection of poems, Himmelbegravelsen (Sky Burial). The remainder of the text was commissioned for this production. Wind through to one face in a crowd, dark with forgetting - An underwater current sets her hand to waving and she sways in silhouette She is but one drowned dancer among many who have forsaken choreography and have entered into silence where the sunlight sails on a film of mineral salts As yet still caught inside your lungs, a pocket of air confined by your ribs As yet the telegraph still crackles within its own closed circuit where the gills of the heart palpate as yet her name is still dawning on your lips - echo of that name you bound in music e'er she fell from your face - With your vast mouth you colour you colour the water red as you mime her name and feel the salt in your eye. You snatch at silhouetted forms Only to be brushed by riven silk brushed a shiver from the soul as the shoul turns away - You raise her up from the ocean floor dancing with face averted she pitches, heavy as a sleeper in your arms Strung out in the air between circling silhouettes with wind rushing through feathers The two leading birds hold everything spellbound the sun refuses to rise the day hangs at rest in its heaven no shadows race across the mountain tops they too await the butcher's cry As he cuts off the head the faintness again face to face with features with eyes and an open mouth so staggeringly weightless without its body -------- According to legend a myrtle wreath bobs off into the dusk the concert grands play, sable-sailed with masts by the hundred the ships go down -------- On the shoreline a seagull's raucous cry sounds across white stones sleep and forgetting in symphony capsuled in amber caskets Underneath I am blue and hard as a Rock

Selected Performances

Educational Material

Operation:Orfeo is a musical work that draws on the basic principles of visual art. A reconceptualisation of the opera genre. Causal and dramaturgic sequence in libretto and music is replaced by a series of tableaux and compositions informed by purely visual and auditive principles rather than by dramatic modes of narration. The performance is a visual interpretation which comes to rediscover the basic elements of traditional opera.

The myth about Orpheus' journey to the underworld is not retold in a direct way. Rather, it serves as a dramaturgical device with the classical division of the myth into three parts informing a series of images translated into a contemporary scenic language. It hints at the mythic narrative without ever illustrating it. The three parts correspond with the stages in which the events of the mythic narrative unfold: the descent, the ascent and the loss - visualised in images of light and shadow, flat surface and depth.

The libretto is a sensuous flow of words performed as symphonic a capella singing. Like a glowing poem it dives into the fluid, colourful and shady underworld of the ocean to re-emerge at the Roof of the World in the middle of a death cult being performed.

The music of the performance creates a play of difference through oppositions that entice and illuminate each other: the tenuous and the voluminous, the sporadic and the unifying, the soloist and the chorus.

The performance is simple like a surgical incision and complicated like major surgery.

Duration 80 min. no intermission

Danish

OPERATION : ORFEO En billedopera i tre satser 1993 Operation : Orfeo er et musikalsk værk skabt ud fra billedkunstneriske grundprincipper. Forestillingen repræsenterer en ny tilgang til operagenren. Kravet til årsagssammenhæng og dramatisk forløb i libretto og musik er erstattet af en række tableauer og kompositioner, bestemt af rent visuelle og auditive principper snarere end af dramatiske fortællemåder - en billedtolkning, der genfinder den traditionelle operas grundelementer. Myten om Orfeus' rejse til underverdenen bliver ikke genfortalt direkte. Men den tjener som et dramaturgisk forløb med den klassiske tredeling som udgangspunkt for en serie billeder, komponeret og oversat til et moderne scenisk billedsprog. Det antyder, men illustrerer aldrig det mytiske materiale. Tredelingen refererer til mytens udviklingsfaser: nedstigningen, opstigningen og tabet, synliggjort som billeder i mørke og lys, i flade og dybde. Librettoen er en sanselig beskrivelse, fremført som symfonisk sang uden instrumentalt akkompagnement. Som et glødende digt dykker den ned i havets substansløse, farverige, skyggefulde underverden og dukker op midt i et døderitual på verdens tag. Musikken i forestillingen bæres af modsatte kvaliteter, der spiller op til hinanden; det spinkle til det voluminøse, det spredte til det samlede, solisten til koret. Forestillingen er enkel som et kirurgisk snit og kompliceret som en stor operation. Varighed 80 min. uden pause

Temadag om Operation:Orfeo på ARoS

Operation:Orfeo, kunsten og det sensoriske
Temaaften med oplæg og omvisning
Fredag d. 12. februar, 2021 kl. 17.00 – 20.30
ARoS

Hotel Pro Forma gæster d. 11. februar 2021 Musikhuset Aarhus med det ikoniske hovedværk Operation:Orfeo.

Forestillingen er en moderne klassiker, baseret på myten om Orfeus og Eurydike, hvis lige vi hverken finder æstetisk eller genremæssigt inden for dansk scenekunst.

Operation:Orfeo er et musikalsk værk, en billedopera, som er skabt ud fra billedkunstneriske grundprincipper og repræsenterer en ny tilgang til operagenren.

Forestillingen blev skabt til Aarhus Festuge tilbage i 1993 på Musikhuset Aarhus og har rejst over hele verden siden. Musik er komponeret af Bo Holten og John Cage. Libretto er skrevet af Ib Michael.

I denne forbindelse afholdes temadag fredag d. 12. februar 2021 på ARoS som sætter fokus på Operation:Orfeo: Teater som visuel kunst, scenisk installation, koreografi, lysdesign, fortælling og opera.

Arrangementet vil belyse spørgsmål som: Hvordan er værket blevet skabt og opført gennem næsten 30 år? Hvordan skabes den æstetiske sensoriske relation til tilskuerne? Hvad betyder den perceptuelle og emotionelle relation for tilskuerne? Og sidst, men ikke mindst: Hvilken position har værket i Hotel Pro Formas historie? Oplægsholderne er Kirsten Dehlholm, instruktør og kunstnerisk leder, Hotel Pro Forma, og fra Aarhus Universitet, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur: Peter M. Boenisch, professor, Morten Kyndrup, Professor og Erik Exe Christoffersen, Lektor.

Aftenen slutter af med en omvisning i udstillingen James Turrell - ARoS to the next level.

Temaaftenen er gratis ved fremvisning af købt billet til Operation:Orfeo dagen forinden, d. 11. februar kl. 20.00, i Musikhuset Aarhus eller ved køb af entrébillet til ARoS.

Pladsen er sikret når den bekræftes fra Hotel Pro Forma. Reservation sker til mail@hotelproforma.dk.

Arrangør: ARoS, Aarhus Universitet og Hotel Pro Forma