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SEEN
AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL CONCERT REVIEW
Wolfgang Rihm,“I am a mistake” :
(world premiere) Soloists, Ensemble Recherche, Text, choreography, sets and directing, Jan Fabre , Athens
Concert Hall, 29.11.2007 (BM)
Jan Fabre - Picture © Malou Swinnen
Chain-smoking dancers in glittery black dresses, a silent film (by
Chantal Akerman) showing poignant, yet extremely repetitive images
of beautiful women, all puffing away, a good deal of moaning in
the murky background, presumably from the two baritones mentioned
in the program (Matthias Horn and Johannes M. Kösters), and a
group of musicians (the Ensemble Recherche) slogging away at one
of Wolfgang Rihm’s newest scores: this more or less sums up the
first and worst part of the evening, a drip feed of a
nicotine-laden preface leading up to Fabre’s “Monologue for an
Inveterate Smoker”. Actually, it was more like a self-indulgent
treatise on why smokers are supposedly non-conformists, imposingly
performed by actress Hilde Van Mieghem, and the only real
substance to the entire performance. At roughly half an hour, it
was presumably considered to be too brief to warrant selling
tickets – what a shame.
Evidently this piece is meant to be a cry of freedom against the
demands of our fitness and health-fad driven society, doubtless
reprehensible and often unbearable, but is smoking really an
avant-garde response? Perhaps Fabre’s text, which is not without
the odd interesting line (“I am a mistake because I find the
inner lives of others boring, …because I think highly of poverty,
…because I find erudition implausible”), would have had the
potential to make a greater impression back in 1988 he first wrote
it. Smoking is simply not that much of an issue anymore these
days, and there is nothing cool or rebellious, about it; the times
when the suffragettes, or indeed Max Beckmann in his many
self-portraits, could make a statement by holding a cigarette are
long gone.
What a disappointment after all of the excitement here in Athens
over hosting the world premiere of a performance created by such a
remarkable artist (I like to think of him as the Joseph Beuys of
performance arts). Presumably this is what happens when artists
are under pressure to churn out “new” works every so often, and in
this case it would seem to be especially true of Rihm’s music –
where is the spunk of his early string quartets? Fabre has said
that he seeks to provoke audiences by unsettling them, not by
merely displaying crude or shocking material. But alas, far from
doing anything of the sort, this show seemed like a great waste of
time and talent (not to mention fantastic haircuts), the first
hour so dull it had me struggling to keep my eyes open.
Not that Fabre will care – and good for him.
Bettina Mara
Production pictures © Stefanos