Newsreel - November 2011 - Obscenity didn't cut the edge at the Vlaamse Opera

In the UNESCO nominated City of Creative Music, Ghent, Belgium Flanders, creativity in musical experiments are being taken seriously and require perspectives suitable for enlargements, meta-research and sufficient middle distance which enables dialogue. Tatjana Gürbaca's Tsjarodejka fails to provide any of these conditions. And this is where the flaw in the programming of the Vlaamse Opera lies and hurts the most, it seems to have dishes up dated sensation, confused it with avant garde and thought the it would get sold to the public. It didn't.
- Argo Spier, Opera Pages

Tatjana Gürbaca's Tsjarodejka of Pjotr Iljitsj Tsjaikovsi, a co-production with the Theater Erfurt

With its November 2011 programming of Tatjana Gürbaca's Tsjarodejka of Pjotr Iljitsj Tsjaikovsi, a co-production with the Theater Erfurt in Germany, the Vlaamse Opera became the award winner of the dubious title of the one Opera House in the Benelux with the least insight in building an avant garde repertoire with its program installation. The Opera has lost all communication with its audience. Tatjana Gürbaca's obscenities didn't cut the edge for the opera and the identity crisis that now has been simmering on its operatic scene since the previous much beloved and able Intendant, Marc Clemur, left it for l'Opéra national du Rhin in Strassbourg, has now become an open discussion among Operagoeers. Avil Kahn took over from Marc Clemur in 2009.

Tsjaikovsi's Tsjarodejka may have seemed a logical choice after Calixto Bieito's Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny of Bertolt Brecht, which was programmed as part of the opening performances for 2011-2012. Both Tsjarodejka and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny are less known operas and both fits to the theme the Opera House seems to have been exploiting for a while now, decadence and collapse. Now, after Gürbaca's Tsjarodejka, the exposure to the theme seems to have taken a disprortionate toll on the audiences. But really, the core of the problem is to be found in the poverty of Tatjana Gürbaca's approach. The passé vernacular of Gürbaca's dated expression of decadence is what made the apple that is now lying rotting in the bosom of the Vlaamse Opera suddenly fall from its branch.

Examples of this, such as her graffiti penis on the side of the stage and the nude black man with a green mask (it may also have been a white man painted black so that there would be no repercussions concerning the color black) waving his ridiculously small penis into the audience and bobbing his head at the rhythm of the swaying of his body, concentrating on it instead of concentrating on his function in the choir, suffice. There's no way that such vulgar, dated and unfunctional utterances of decadence can add a glimmer of hope to a production produced today and/or make the aura of an Opera House's notority ooze out. The plain lack of any intelligent subtilety in the production advertises, in huge neon capitals, its weak construction and emphasis - its an attempt to be within the league of hype. No wonder many of the audience left after the first act to go have a pizza at the back of the Opera House where the sphere is almost operatic with its functional hussle and buzzle and boredom a far cry. Comparing pizza with Gürbaca's Tsjarodejka - pizza excites the palate.

In the first act there is nothing, but absolutely nothing, that bears any resemblance to a Tjaikovskian bawdy, brawling, boozy setting of a get-together of bums in a booze house. His music suggests slumbering proletarianism yet revolt and patriotism at the same time, salty ingrediences that Gürbaca translates into high school imitation of bravura, using a stage million of miles too small for the foot stamping and hand clapping choir that drowns out the orchestra. Tjaikowski's original setting was Russian and Gürbaca's is nihilist, patheticaly and devoid of function and sense. Reference to the locale of the opera in the body of the opera universalis lacks completely. There is no trace of where the opera is at in the history of opera in the production and/or it fails somewhere among the irratic incoherence of the totality. There's no congruency in it and the non-congruency is not used to make a statement. If Gürbaca was thinking to have it over the sometimes faulty idea that contemporary opera is opera to be employed with mantissa only, at wish and will, and that it is an opera designer's right to add 'verbal' additions, also at wish and will, thereby destroying whatever is core source material to the opera's encryptment, she may have had a point and critics would have jumped to rejoice her. The production has no hint in it that this idea was effectivly in her mind when she created the concept for the opera.

Even so, the at will and wish auditioning of existing partritures, scripts and tradition has its preczrioud side to it. And mostly the result is unsatisfactory, if not disastrous, to any production. A good example of such processes ruining opera can presently be observed at the Oper Köln with the production of Clemens Bechtel and Matthias Schaller's Messa da Requiem of Giuseppe Verdi. It is being performed in the Palladium hall in Köln and is running till December 2011. In this respect Gürbaca's production of Tsjarodejka is of the more gluttonous kind - it takes the cake of about everything that can go wrong in an opera. It refuses to contribute to discussion, dialogue and wonder. Tsjarodejka, as it ran on the 8th of November in the Vlaamse Opera in Ghent, Belgium, represents a weak imitation of hype that is so passé that one could cry.

The syllable use of Gübaca in her operatic parole, with and to the public, is so inadequate and meaningless that the tears of the crying person in the previous sentence just can't stop. Such nitty-no-witty artifacts, as a the costumed bear in the first act ... oh, what was that all about? Was it programmed as encryption for a Russian give-away? No, it was nothing of that sort; it was a just a wink to a Father Christmassy image and sick in its inadequacy. And what is the meaning of the bobbing green head of the Penis Man? Was it meant as reference to a Jack Nicolsanian interpretation of the Bad Guy in a Bat Man movie? The most crucial question however is where did Gürbaca (and the Vlaamse programmers for that matter) think she (they) wanted to take the Flemish audiences to? To a gay parade based on a love parade that stranded with several deaths in a subway on a stage as small as a dolls house ... in a town called Duisburg?

And, to return to the case of the penises, nowhere in Tjaikowski's music is the phallic 'on the wall' or 'flaunted'. The phalus he deals with quivers and is vertical both in position and in movement in his music. And anyway, there is no such a thing as a horizontal, and devoid of meaning, penis in art. There is also no dedicative in the production and it didn't come together, neither does it hold, which is a preogative in any art form. Worst, for many of the audience, the 45 minutes of the first act lasted like an eternity of being caught up in some sort of re-enactment of a traffic jam on a stage reduced in size to fit in a Gymnasium sports hall. Throughout it, there was that feel of being taken for a ride and/or being taken hostage in the audience. This would have been OK had Gürbaca used it to make a point of intelligence, through which concourse could be established, but once again, she did not.

It must be said however, that similar pulses of filth and inadequacy in Tatjana Gürbaca's work did work for her in the past. Below please find a quote from the archives quotes and a link to a Newsreel concerning her production of Salome in Duisburg in 2009 which also was provocative but was accepted as innovative by the biggest part of the audience. For some reason, however, rubbish made sense in 2009. Today the trend is 'old' and there's a deja vu feel about it.

In the 2010 UNESCO awarded City of Creative Music, Ghent, creativity in musical experiments are being taken seriously and require perspectives suitable for enlargements, meta-research and sufficient middle distance that enables dialogue. Tatjana Gürbaca's Tsjarodejka fails to provide any of these conditions. And this is where the flaw in the programming of the Vlaamse Opera lies and hurts the most, it dished up dated sensation, confused it with avant garde and thought it would get sold to the public. It didn't. And regarding the co-operation with the Theater Erfurt in Germany, it seems that a new element ) has entered the equation - 'What's hot in Erfurt, Germany (and Köln too for that matter) is long gone passé in the domain of the real in the City of Music, Ghent, in the Flemish sector of Belgium.

Tatjana Gürbaca's Salome, 2009
- [Click for Archived Newsreel - Argo Spier]

"...On its Premiere on the 19th of September in Duisburg, Tatjana Gürbaca's Salome proved to be the needed needle that could prick open the party balloon and let the concourse happen. A strange flavoured vapour of agitation however seems to have oozed out, namely the toxin of meta introspection and confrontation. Her creation is one of the finest exhibits of a congruent use of form-content unity seen on the opera productions scene. The provocation flowing from it forms a strong basis for debate. It exposed the first layers of individual sentiments (likes and dislikes) for what they are, and confronted the spectator with the need for a renewed meta questioning of his own expectations. This Pandora box, once opened fully, will initiate further discussion and debate of a much more perilous nature – namely, it will address the question of the 'why' of expectations.

Tatjana Gürbaca's production of Salome has achieved what few other productions achieve – creating an instant ersatz (a mirror) for the spectator to reflect the very source of his expectations of opera. The sexual aberrations in the drama were not, as such, exploited but the boredom and nihilistic horizontals that result in the despair of unfulfilling desires. Taking a boxy cliché to the extreme, the stage view was even narrowed in breadth and height by some three meters both ways and the homeliness of homespun decadence on the stage was reflected with reversed perspective. It mimicked the spectator’s individual small room of his chair and reduced him to a peeping tom, watching how others are engaged in lustful embroidery that doesn’t really rise above the level of doodling. The spectator was drawn into voyeurism, now expecting a saucy swing party, but ends up with vulgar disgust for not being able to supply a needed authenticity.

Argo Spier, Opera Critic Benelux
Consulting editor, Elaine Parney, USA.

Newsreel Archives – Opening the Season 2008 - 2009, the Vlaamse Opera in Ghent, Belgium delivers one of the largest contributions to the Festival van Vlaanderen's 50th Birthday festival by housing three of its jubilant events as guest concerts - Kaffee Zimmerman (16 and 23 September), Pitié! Les Ballets C de la B (14, 15 and 16 September) and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. The Festival van Vlaanderen opens with the grand yearly event of OdeGand on the 13th of September and lasts till the beginning of October 2008. On this day music can be heard across the world from numerous halls and on boats on the canals.

At the Café Zimmerman in the Redoute Hall of the Vlaamse Opera, Gent.

OdeGand has grown into one of the most popular and distinguished single day classical happenings in this part of Europe.

Archive - On the 5th of June 2008 was the premiere of the eagerly awaited Ivo van Hove regie of the ‘Last Night’ of Der Ring des Niebelungen, Göttdammerung. The performance took place in the Vlaamse Opera in Antwerp. The production of Der Ring des Niebelungen over a period of two years sparked a lively debate among Wagnerians. The performance of Vorabond - Das Rheingold, the first opera in the Gezamtwerk of Richard Wagner, took place in Ghent, in the second Opera House of the Vlaamse Opera, in 2006. The ultra modern stage setting of the first three operas of Der Ring des Niebelungen with Jan Versweyveld doing the stage (with the use of digital cameras, television sets, computer chips and laser beams) raised expectations for this last production of the series (with its iconic references to virtuality and the decadence of Second Life software) to quite a high level. Over these past two years, for many a Wagner lover the productions has been a shock, having been exposed heretofore only to definitions such as the Carsen and Mckinmonth’s 'Ring am Zwei Tagen' or 'Grüner Ring' (Köln Oper, Germany - 2006). The naked awareness brought forward with van Hove's interpretation has made of Richard Wagner’s critique of Society a very scary business. The present production of Göttdammerung proves the point. It is a superb production with the expected high quality in performances across the board.

With the 'van Hove's Ring', as the it was dubbed from the beginning, the Vlaamse Opera has placed itself on a notch so high on the scale of Mainstream opera that no opera researcher could go by it in future and not take note of its productions.

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Archive - February 2008 - The opera La Strada of Luc Van Hove and Eric de Kuyper had its World Premiere in Antwerp, Belgium on the 29th of January 2008. It is a Vlaamse Opera production which had received World Creation status and it is part of the Opera's Fellini Cycle. The Premiere took place in the newly renovated Opera House and La Strada is the first opera to be performed in it - perfect choices. Exceptional to the opera is the solution Luc Van Hove found in the music to suggest 'being in transit' when the 'story' goes from 'one frozen stilled picture' to the next. This novelty is called 'stradas', which make it possible to transform the episodic Fellini road movie (1954) into congruent opera. The idea is for the opera to have the same effect on the spectator as the movie.

La Strada is not only a beautiful opera presenting fragile 'real-life' pictures, but it is also a true echo of what Fellini depicted. Plus, there's the excitement of the new in it.

Libretto by Eric de Kuyper, after the film La Strada of Federico Fellini. The filmscript is by Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano

local press reaction
discription of the opera (in flemish)

la strada - a lovely and tender opera

- a fragile story with a lovely pastice moving in the refined world of Fellini.

Archive - November 2007 - Real danger-provoking illusion and apocalyptical collapse persist in the Vlaamse Opera as Ivo Van Hove's Siegfried, Richard Wagner's second day in Der Ring des Niebelungen, makes itself ready for its Premiere in Ghent, Belgium on the 4th of November 2007. This patiently awaited performance will be a test case for Van Hove to see if his subtle shift in the definition of archaic symbols has come together and has held in his production of the Ring over two seasons.

The premiere of Siegfried is on the 4th of November 2007 and it runs till mid December 2007. Production and stage setting for the three-act opera are by ivo van hove and jan versweyveld The Music Director is ivan t örzs

Ivo Van Hove brings it all together and ‘makes’ it happen again

[Excerpt of article - Ivo Van Hove's Siegfried and the re-enactment of the primeaval scene - Ghent, Belgium]
©argospier 05/11/2007 - 1000 words.
Editor/Consultant - Joneve McCormick]

The mise-en-scène in Ivo Van Hove’s production of Richard Wagner’s Gezamtkunstwerk, the Ring des Niebelungen, in the Vlaamse Opera in Belgium, now into days two and three with Siegfried and Göttdammerung, grabs the spectator, absorbs him and leaves him with a feeling of uneasy relief. The spectator is touched by a trace of his own perilous impotence. It is the afterglow of a total experience of angst.

This is a trumpet on the shoulder of Ivo Van Hove because it shows that the production has touched a sensitive string in the soul of the spectator. And to such a degree that a transformation of archaic symbols has been achieved. The spectator has acquired a new paradigm to deal with archetypical data in his own life. This causes the poised uneasiness. It makes the spectator aware of the potential for catharsis and the need for purification. Actually, this is what is supposed to happen in all opera - the blending and merging of realities in dialectical fashion. Ivo Van Hove’s production of Siegfried has achieved this. It has shown the spectator the ‘face of the beast’ and he now has an idea of the ‘nature’ of the beast.

The production is set in the vernacular of 9/11 and the inevitable post 9/11 horrors that followed it. But really, the horror Van Hove applies in his production has its roots in the human consciousness of the oldest Siegfried and the perils that befall his dreams, beyond and before what surfaced like a slow crawling spider on 9/11, the rotten roots of a Bill Gates’s egocentric example and logic of outwitting a Big Blue (IBM) with source codes of an operating system and thereby becoming the richest man in America with unlimited financial power; and the slow growing cancer from the self-proclaimed Mediator of Pain, CNN, in the middle 90's, which has now reached a boil over of variety surreal reality. (CNN actually creates news where there is only rituality and LCD and crystal flat screens. It plugs-and-play.)

inter-active wizard

Ivo Van Hove is ‘inter-acting wizard’ and tool of and for the creation of Richard Wagner. His daring interpretation with shifts in the semantics of archaic symbols challenges the spectator to distinguish the ‘real’ and the ‘what is alive’ in the collective mind of today; to use his own flat alienation in a computerised and changing world to face ‘untruths’ told to sooth consciousnesses; to collaborate in the re-enactment of Mythical drama that exposes ‘real truths’ about the possible purpose of being. This is exactly what Wagner set out to do when he got engulfed with his own interpretation of the rising and falling of dynasties and the cataclysms of civilizations. The re-enactment of Siegfried brings forth a confrontation with the archetypes that rule the Psyche and life of the individual. This is a collective and collaborative ‘thing’ – there’s the story (libretto), the music (composer), the mise-en-scène (the producer) and the spectator. And it never is a singular event. With the production of Siegfried (Ring des Niebelungen) it is not Ivo Van Hove and/or Wagner; it is both of them, the collective force field and the spectator in a unified conspiracy performing a recurring necessary rite. And the only question that really matters is - does the spectator enter this quantum stringed space of the collective unconscious that is generated on stage and does he become aware of being part of the immediate ersatz of the re-enactment? Evaluation is only of relative validity - was the strength of Van Hove’s contribution in the generation of this space sufficient? If the spectator feels uneasy ‘afterwards’ – there is actually not an ‘afterwards’ as re-enactment processes of primal scenes are cumulative and continuous – it is a slight indication of the value of Van Hove’s input. Something has happened.

The spectator got involved … he felt ‘uneasy’. ‘Wagner’ has touched him.

The production of Ivo Van Hove’s Ring (and this is certainly the case with the production of Siegfried) has achieved for the spectator that needed ‘seeing of the beast’ – he ‘saw' and 'was seen.. And now that it has occurred … there will be an even stress on Ivo Van Hove to bring it all together and ‘make’ it happen again, with the production of Gottdämmerung in June 2008.

walküre
- march 2007 production of the Walküre - day one of Der Ring des Nibelungen

focus on realism and modern definition

[Excerpt of article - The Carson and Kinmonth production of 'Der Ring des Niebelungen' (Köln, Germany) versus the production of Ivo Van Hove (Gent, Belgium).
©argospier20/03/2007 - 1000 words.
Editor/Consultant - Joneve McCormick]

Van Hove’s ‘Ring’ makes use of very modern stage techniques and exceptional effects. With its use of high voltage lighting, contrasts with bright neon splashes opposing dark eerie spot-lighted corners, laser beams and enormous moving steel and glass cubes and pillars, etc., it scored higher in this rank than the Carson and Kinmonth production in Köln. The focus of the production was on ‘realism’ and modern definition. From the onset, the spectator relived in ‘Vorabond, Das Rheingold 2006’ and ‘Walküre 2007’, real danger-provoking illusion and apocalyptical collapse. The events in world history in recent times, and images seen on CNN and other sensation-seeking TV channels, became a reality on an illusionary stage. Ivo Van Hove’s ‘New Brave World of Myth’ had a touch of a 9/11 New York aftermath. The spectator was IN ground zero.

Other remarkable aspects of the production aided the spectator in his journey with Ivo Van Hove, his subtle shift in the definition of symbols, par example. In Carson and Kinmonth's production Van Hove replaced the sword, 'real', hard, sharp and made of steel, with a most provocative and creative idea: the phallic shape got changed into that of a flat square of plastic, the size of half a cigarette packet; namely, it is a silicon chip. This chip with its archetypical tetrakis (4 corners, feminine) oozed, however, the same virile masculine power as the wondrous sword in the Wandering Myths Wagner consolidated to form the 'Ring de Nibelungen' and in Carson and Kinmonth's production. It contained enough data to produce the mightiest WMD ever seen on our Blue Planet, now threatened with Global Warming as revealed by Al Gore's very popular documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth' that ran in the Gent Downtown at the same time as Van Hove's 'Walkure'.

Vorabond
- 2006 production of the Vorabond of Der Ring des Nibelungen

subtle shift in the definition of symbols

The concept 'Untergang der Welt' has been 'exposed' by Ivo Van Hove as the modern form of manipulative systems of management that had its foundation in the 16th Century, two hundred years before Wagner, in Protestant ideas concerning the valorisation of time given by God. And for Ivo Van Hove, moral corruption, with its social symptoms such as muggings, drive-by shootings, callous and cowardly 'religious' assaults and other senseless violence, portrays the 'new' dynamo of the world in which Gottdämmerung reigns, the evaporation of the potent in human society. This is paramount in Wagner's score too, and often thought of as the core of Wagnerian thought. The emphasis in Carsen and Kinmoth's production underscores the validity of this perception, with the result that the age-old debate concerning 'Untergang' and fatal destiny gets stoked to life yet again.

lunch concerts

Archive - October 2007 - Bea De Smet with Ann Engels, Deborah Mcclung, Brigit Langenhuysen and Myriam Hordies in Smooth & Spicy at the Vlaamse Opera Lunch concert in Ghent, Belgium - a memoriable performance between high and low.

Almost a 'fab-five' with its core group of fans, these ladies attracted insiders and lovers of the genré that lies between high and low, those enthusiasts who refuse to opt for any one kind of music and who oppose distinguishing between commercial Broadway and high flying Classical music.

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