Psyche, The Web Opera: Visualizing the Invisible
Opera. The word conjures up all sorts of cliché images. Plush yet uncomfortable chairs. Blue-haired toffs in dinner jackets with a permanent scowl etched intaglio upon their faces. Interminable arias shrieked not sung by 300-pound sopranos. Emotional subtlety on the level of WWE wrestling. Artists singing "Have a whiskey" at each other. Whatever the stereotype in their heads, most people under the age of 60 avoid anything with the word "opera" the way a three year-old avoids green vegetables - witness the incredibly underwhelming response to last May's production of the brilliant El Gallo at On the Boards.
Yet dedicated artists continue to breathe new life into the moribund form. In search of newer, younger, broader audiences, they try new approaches, new stories, new orchestrations, new structures, new technologies to convey the beauty and the fresh possibility for opera in the 21st Century to those who turn their noses up at anything resembling high culture with an inverted snobbery.
For the past two years, the Fisher Ensemble have been experimenting with the idea of "web opera." In the web opera, the idea is not to create a visual representation of live performance, such as a simple three-camera recording of a show a la mode de PBS, but a presentation from scratch, designed specifically for the internet.
In their first attempt at web opera, the Fisher Ensemble offered an online competition: Using the score of Garrett Fisher's opera The Passion of Saint Sebastian, filmmakers could make a film of two minutes or less set to any part of the music. The competition brought thirty-nine entries, some of them quite brilliant, covering a wide range of styles. The thing the films lacked was continuity. Though sufficient in themselves, the films were quite discrete and shared almost no similarities with each other either stylistically or in terms of narrative. Connection between films was rare and purely by chance.
Psyche, The Web Opera takes a more unified approach. In Psyche, the five sections of the opera each represent the viewpoint of one of the characters in the story: Aphrodite, the King, Eros (Cupid), Psyche's sister Orual and Persephone. The films within each section are done by a single filmmaker, giving the sections an internal unity. Furthermore, filmmaker Ryan K. Adams filmed footage of Christy Fisher's choreography (including veteran dancers Ines Andrade, Mary Cutrera, and Archana Kumar), in various locations including in front of a green screen. Each filmmaker then takes this dance footage and works it into their own film. Sometimes the dancers serve as principal actors, other times as a sort of chorus. This ensures a non-literal yet recurring motif gives each of the films a further interrelation and continuum.
The web opera encourages a non-linear exploration and in Psyche, The Web Opera the filmmakers, Ryan K. Adams, Luke Sieczek, Jacob Snyder and Ian Lucero have taken also a non-linear approach to narrative in their films. Instead of creating one long video, the seventeen different "episodes" allows viewers to enter and exit the piece as they like, to interact with the videos by exploring hyperlinks that talk about aspects of the piece such as the mythological and historical characters within the opera, the soundtrack, the choreography and the original texts that inspired the piece (particularly C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces and the original telling of the story from Lucius Apuleius' The Golden Ass). This is web opera firmly in the vein of experimental film.
In the C.S. Lewis novel and the original live version of Mr. Fisher's Psyche, Psyche herself is never seen. Though the web opera preserves this mysterious approach by never telling the story from Psyche's point of view, the filmmakers occasionally use Psyche's silhouette as a powerful motif, her figure seen and yet unseen. This device has been used in various experimental films all the way back to Watson and Webber's Fall of the House of Usher and particularly in Stan Brakhage's Anticipation of the Night. Each of the filmmakers uses the motif in various ways throughout his section.
The first part of the opera is Aphrodite's story. Noted filmmaker Luke Sieczek has interpreted the story in terms of emotion. His films in the section feature hard contrasts, red tones alternating with stark black and white. Where the "Famine" section begins with shots of dust, barren branches and sandy loam all tinted a desaturated orange, in the "Idle Fields" section the red tones become angry, frenzied as the music changes from the lyrical, spare shakuhachi melody to a percussive dance like a dithyramb. The waves that begin the section and represent the goddess (Aphrodite meaning "born of sea foam") change from monochrome to red, and the three dancers come to resemble the Three Furies. Eventually, the frenzy stops abruptly and the waves recede into a shot of dewdrops on glass and the tolling of bells that signal the beginning of the third film "Empty Temples."
The music here is slow, solemn. The rhythm cutting of the film is equally much slower, with alternate images of hands: first wiping away the dew, then becoming the hand of a woman dancing in the river, frantic but more subdued. It's a clever use of visual analogy and ties neatly into the first two sections as it blends into the next film "See Our Need," which extends the dance analogy even further and more lyrically. Mr. Sieczek's layering of meaning through color, gesture and editing rhythm is quite striking and beautiful like Aphrodite herself - though perhaps an angry Aphrodite one dare not mess with.
Part 2 is the King's tale. Unlike the opening section, it is spare, almost representational with its distorted yet realistic imagery in the "Warnings" section and a restrained use of montage throughout. Where Luke Sieczek's imagery is collage-based, Ryan K Adams has taken the human perspective here, with much more measured, simpler imagery. It is no less stark for that. In the "Bow to the Crown" section the dance footage comes completely to the fore, with Archana Kumar dancing solo in front of a backdrop of a water-soaked riverside. Christy Fisher's choreography is, as usual, oblique yet somehow narrative, as Ms. Kumar dances the story of how Psyche's father, the King, tries in vain to prevent his daughter from being sacrificed to Aphrodite on the mountain top. Ms. Kumar continues her dance in "To The Mountain," joined by the two other dancers, Mary Cutrera and Ines Andrade. Here they function as a sort of Three Furies chorus. The score again becomes percussive as the dancers enact their tale of vengeance against an arid background. Their lines interweave and become like links in a chain - or snares in a net. The dance ends abruptly and cuts to black.
Jacob Snyder's contribution is the sensuous tale of Eros, who wounds himself with his own arrow and falls madly in love with Psyche. Eros rescues Psyche from the mountaintop, removes her to his valley castle and becomes her nocturnal lover. He vows to take care of her as long as she does not look at his face. The story is familiar enough. Mr. Snyder's handling of the theme is sensitive and beautiful. Using minimal building blocks - images of satin curtains blowing in wind, a male hand stroking a purple spangled satin sheet, a male silhouette, a female's hair in silhouette blowing in breeze, pearly water droplets falling in a slow stream, streaks of paint dripping against a glass palette, fireworks - out of these Mr. Snyder creates a beautiful series of layered images that evoke the eroticism and doom of the encounter. Mr. Snyder says that it is deeply influenced by Jackson Pollock's Landscape with Steer. It strikes me as reminiscent more of Pollock's action painting but I won't argue with the creator. It is probably the easiest way to enter into the web opera as a whole. It is pure emotion and extremely sensual. It is also extremely effective.
Ryan K Adams returns to direct the tale of Psyche's sister. It is much more abstract than his prior section and even more minimalist. "Aphrodite's Wrath," the first part of the section, is essentially a single flashlight beam traveling against a couple different backgrounds. It is an economical way to symbolize Aphrodite's search for the hidden Psyche, effective by understatement. The second part of section is a return of the technique in "Bow to the Crown" with a single dancer (Ines Andrade this time, I think) against a projected background, but here the dancer herself is distorted and laughing maniacally as her arms stretch like rubber across the frame. Then again the other two dancers join her and dance the remainder of the tale of the sister's envy and plot to have Psyche killed by her own lover.
The web opera's final section tells the tale of Psyche from the view of Persephone, the goddess of the underworld. Ian Lucero's images in the first part of the section are almost a mirror image of the vegetation imagery in Ryan K Adams' earlier section "Oracle." Then they dissolve into winter imagery and dancer Mary Cutrera appears in a somber, royal purple robe against dying grass to symbolize Psyche's descent into Hades. Image of the dancer alternates at first with tracking shots of railroad tracks then becomes a quite elaborate collage of what looks like a jellyfish with electrical tentacles crawling its way across imagery of the Three Furies in silhouette and various marine life.
At the end of the film section, however, the jellyfish rights itself as the camera zooms in and it becomes clear that what looked like a jellyfish is in fact, the light at the end of a railroad tunnel, with its rails as the tentacles. It is a brilliant symbol of Psyche's journey through the underworld and ties the collage imagery together cleverly and with a clear wit. Finally, the marine imagery appears again in the closing segment of the film, "Box of Beauty," where Psyche returns from the underworld through a world of monochrome black-and-white sea life, coral, starfish and dancing lights. The music is slow, somber chanting, the way that Garrett Fisher mixes his influences of Japanese court music, European medieval chant and the timeless quality of the Hindustani vocal alap, and brings the web opera to its haunting close.
Psyche, The Web Opera is more than just a collection of brilliant experimental films. It is a coherent attempt to address the problem of relating music and visual imagery thematically yet nonlinearly. Where MTV and the like have taken the vocabulary of experimental film from Bruce Conner, Stan Brakhage and others and turned it into something quite mind-numbing and trite, the Fisher Ensemble and their film collaborators here have tried to restore the beauty of both forms - opera and experimental film - to a nobler purpose. To dismiss it out of hand simply because it carries the label of "opera" would be to miss an event of great beauty. This is powerful work. It deserves a chance to thrive, even among people in a city where linguistic stereotypes of what is/is not art of whatever strip seem to be at an all-time ignorant high.
Online, ongoing. Hi-res videos on Vimeo. Lo-res videos on YouTube. For more information, check out the Fisher Ensemble website, http://www.fisherensemble.com
