Vulture (Of the Nightingale I Envy the Fate)
Photo above: Of the Nightingale I Envy the Fate by Steven Pisano
Monday, January 15
Hello, La MaMa, my old friend. Tonight I’m at the La MaMa space known as the Club for a short and intense piece by the theater company Motus. This Italian/itinerant outfit was founded in 1991 by Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò, who are also the creators of this show, Of the Nightingale I Envy the Fate (or, in Italian, Dell’usignolo io invidio la sorte). The words belong to Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess doomed to be disbelieved. In the Oresteia, she mourns bitterly that, while the nightingale at least has wings and a “sweet song that covers every lament,” the gods have fated her “to be ripped apart / by a terrible double-edged axe.”
The show’s program note describes it as a “performance-cry,” and that feels pretty apt. Of the Nightingale is a 45-minute thrashing, crawling, pulsing solo dance, designed both to exhaust and exult its performer, Stefania Tansini. In slick, cream-colored knee-high boots (with chunky enough heels to make me wince for her knees), neon-pink feathers for eyelashes, and several pieces of creepy-crawly custom latex implying an exposed spine and lower rib cage, Tansini looks ready for the kind of club that opens at 4 a.m. in Ibiza. But that’s part of the point — she, Nicolò, and Casagrande are playing with the myth of Cassandra’s enforced silence not only as a symbol of oppression but as a form of perverse sex appeal. The woman who’s seen and not heard: You can watch her dance, and you don’t have to listen to her. (The character’s fate is exactly that dark: After the fall of Troy, she’s taken back to Greece as a sex slave — sorry, “concubine.”)
Thursday, January 18
This weather and schedule caught up with me a bit yesterday, and I had to take a moment to reset. But now I’m back at La MaMa for almost two and a half intermissionless hours of new experimental opera. I have done my lower-back stretches.
This is Chornobyldorf, my first dip into the Prototype Festival. The show — composed and co-directed by the Ukrainian musical multi-hyphenates Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko — describes itself as an “archeological opera in seven novels” and also, borrowing the term coined by Umberto Eco, as an “opera aperta.” Eco’s phrase, meaning literally “open work,” points at a kind of expansiveness, a porousness and flexibility in an artist’s vision where meaning is manifold and shifting; where the presence of an audience activates and changes the results; where the project will always be, in essence, unfinished.
That should be true of theater as a whole — or at least a damn sight more of it — but, for the moment, at least Grygoriv and Razumeiko haven’t misspoken. Chornobyldorf is a musically rangy, physically risky, wide, deep, and wild piece of work. As an intentional act of ecstatic endurance, for both performers and audience, it leaves you feeling somewhat drugged — as if we’ve all been acolytes in some ancient ritual, and we’ve spent the last two hours stripped naked, inhaling the smoke of various psychotropic herbs.
Article Source:
New York Magazine
“Diary of an Overbooked Theater-Festival Surfer: Week Three”
By
https://www.vulture.com/2024/01/critics-theater-festival-season-diary-week-3.html
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