Normally illuminated by the powerful lens belonging to a pathologist's electromagnetic microscope, the last place a theatre patron would expect to see a molecule is in Space 28 at the Victorian College of the Arts. Deliberately, members of an orchestra, each dressed in uniform white, enter from stage right. Their funereal march complete, each takes a seat in one corner of the performance space. Clarinets are raised, double bass' positioned, and a french horn trumpets the beginning of Avatara; an opera based upon the actual stories of cancer victims and their families.
Theater itself is a collision of disparate forms, sometimes human and vocal, sometimes sonic and cinematic. Four performers and two puppeteers venture forward from the withering design of a dystrophic molecular structure. Indirectly confronting the man responsible for curing the mutation of cell and emotion that debilitates cancer victims and their families, each demands of a prim, authoritarian doctor a diagnosis of the unbearable arbitrariness of life. He sits in a specialised corner, one leg crossing the other, pronouncing judgement upon each case study with intractable objectivity. Meanwhile, a puppeteer circulates around, through and between this vexed dilemma, raising aloft an illuminated tortoise; one life lived in less ethereal, earthbound terms that has since transcended to a spiritual plain. Then across the floor is projected a cancer victim's scintillating red vascularity. A fork of arterial lightning, it is completed by an esoteric crimson pyramid levitating upon a rear screen. If the ugly, fibrous mystery that is a mutating human cell can have aesthetic form, then it is an alien monument of uncertain origin that descends from the heavens upon unsuspecting victims. Consuming all that goes before it, whether human tissue or the theatre patron's gaze, this grandiloquent pyramid and its insatiable appetite is destruction epitomised. Human cells reproduce toward birth, proliferate during life, and disintegrate in death. So too does the molecular synthesis of theatre, and Avatara is no exception. Disparate forms repel and attract their disparate other in the same way a cantankerous cell desires all, but only succeeds in annihilating the human being that housed its initial reproduction. Birth, life and death; we can be fairly certain that this is one dreamcycle circulating within, and alongside, many others As for any final ascent to a spiritual plain, well, we'll just have to wait and see about that...
One certainty is that opera can be a priggish form. Like the medical profession, it assumes the power of life and death; although this conceit is cultural, and unvetted presumptions of superior taste can and should be readily dismissed. During its early scenes Avatara is a specialised performance in danger of alienating its audience. This is not the fault of the project, but more the fault of opera itself. Emanating a tendency to sing its audience into submission, Avatara quickly corrects itself. The puppeteers bring to this stern, sometimes authoritarian art form a child's playfulness, and its consequent devastating insight. The puppet itself does not wear costume. Not does it have any readily identifiable features. It is reminiscent of Ettienne Decroux's promethean mime, and its veiled, archetypal figure that haunts the lower cerebral cortex with images of work contextualised by a sequence of universal tableau. The puppet walks across stage. Then, quite simply, it flies. William Gibson famously said: "The street finds its own use for things". In Avatara, puppetry tempers opera's iron fist, thereby allowing its audience to not only forge an understanding of the libretto's technical demands, but to participate and receive that which is too readily forgotten in the performing arts. Audiences attend shows because they want to be entertained. Communication is characterised by audiences receiving information, as well as contributing their own information. Just as an avatar is a simulated medium between cyberspace and the actual world, Avatara succeeds in difficult terrain because it fulfills the essential requirement of any performing art. Avatara tells a story.
Cancer is an incurable malaise that impacts upon us all, even those who are not directly involved with a cancer patient's decline. But speak to a pathologist involved in finding a cure for this mysterious ailment, and they will tell of their utter fascination with a cancerous cell's capacity to become a near perfect mutating form. An entropic cannibal captivated by the destruction of healthy human cells. A molecular synthesis driven toward death by the irreversible power of Thanatos. Avatara however, is a synthesis of disparate forms and disturbing content that combined, is an uplifting tale of the human capacity for forgiveness, derived from the therapeutic power of community storytelling.
Avatara the Opera
Performers: Judith Dodsworth,
Michael Bishop, Emma O'brien,
Merilyn Quaife & Ian Cousins
Puppeteers: Jacob Williams &
Sarah Kriegler
Video: Ivanka Sokol
Design: Ina Indira Shanahan
Light: Gwen Holmberg-Gilchrist
Composer: Emma Obrien
Music Director: Mark Shiell
Director: Robert Draffin
Space 28, Victorian College of
the Arts, April 16-19, Melb.
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