By Sophie Mayer
Carmen (Alice Coote) lost her voice. Escamillo (David Kempster) missed the dress rehearsal. First-time opera director Sally Potter thinks the art form is “a world of pointless epics played out for the rich. A big space for narrow minds. A dusty antique of a form. A dinosaur.” (Guardian, Sept 2007
Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it?
Not only that, but this backstage gossip isn’t being whispered at the Ivy (or its operatic equivalent): it’s out in public, as part of the ENO’s experiment with new media and online community.
Created especially for Potter’s production of Carmen, the startlingly honest backstage access provided by the mini-site reflects the qualities and themes of the director’s work in and around film. In the 1970s, she was active as a performance artist, engaging audiences in public spaces such as Green Dragon Court and creating a number of shows that satirically explored opera, such as Death and the Maiden and Aida, moving through her celebrated, witty interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, to charting the progress of her most recent film YES around the world as the only established director to write a personal blog and answer forum posts. Potter’s work has emphatically demystified the processes of making art, creating points of access where you least expect them.
And backstage drama has been a subject of her work since the films she created for Richard Alston’s dance piece Combines (1972?), which showed dancers rehearsing and audiences arriving. There will be projections in Carmen as well, exposing the prevalence of video surveillance in contemporary Britain.
The connection between the gossipy, intensely surveillant world of opera and the political significance of surveillance is at the centre of Potter’s film The Man Who Cried (2000), in which Christina Ricci plays Suzie, a Jewish refugee in Paris at the outbreak of WWII. Suzie is engaged to sing in the chorus of an opera company whose attention-loving tenor, Dante Dominio (John Turturro), is a fascist. Everyone is watching everyone, and we get to see Potter’s parodic take on some of the classic operas – especially a ridiculous and chilling scene, after the invasion of Paris scares off both performers and audience, in which Dante is accompanied by a chorus of one: Suzie.
But as Potter told me in an interview, working in the medium and with the singers has given her a new respect for what opera can be. “What you have is you have a highly specialised area of skill that's highlighted in opera, and which the whole thing is a framework for, which is the powerful human voice – the power of the human voice. Opera singers work without amplification, in enormous spaces, and the technical demands, the musculature and the training is quite extraordinary.” Interview here.
Potter – who trained as a dancer in her twenties, and toured as a singer with jazz improvising groups – is no stranger to the discipline of performance. In The Tango Lesson (1997), she plays Sally, a film director feeling estranged by the movie business who takes up learning tango with celebrated tanguilero Pablo Veron; she even performs with him in a tango showcase in Paris, and conceives the idea for a film about a director learning tango from Veron…
Pablo, who “has God’s feet,” according to the Guardian, returns to his collaboration with Potter in Carmen, where he leads a shadow-chorus of dancers. Potter’s work is full of cross-linkages of this kind, whether it’s the opportunity to collaborate again with Veron, or the echo of her collaboration with Taraf de Haïdouks on The Man Who Cried in Carmen’s ‘gypsy’ themes. Part of the excitement of Carmen is wondering how the director who gave us Tilda Swinton gender-blending as Orlando will style the opera’s famously difficult sexual politics…
But part of what excites me is also Potter’s radical determination to engage with new media, with blogs, vlogs, and podcasts, as well as Facebook groups forming part of her embrace of the online community. Engaging with what’s possibly the stuffiest form of high art, Potter has made it determinedly inclusive – not least because you can jump on the Carmen talkboards and tell her what you think.
More information and tickets are available at HERE including information about Access All Arias, the discounted ticket scheme for under-30s.
Sophie Mayer is a postdoctoral fellow in the Screen Media and Cultures programmeat the University of Cambridge. She is currently completing a book on Sally Potter for Wallflower Press (autumn 2008) and a play for Playbox Theatre