Poetry New York

Ariadne Unhinged
Gotham Chamber Opera featuring Armitage Gone! Dance
May 10th 8:00pm Performance
Review by Sally Zebrick

Ariadne Unhinged portrays the mental dissolution of Ariadne, the Cretan princess who, having enabled the heroic triumph of Theseus, awakens on the isle of Naxos to find that her lover has betrayed and abandoned her.

The set features large glass panels printed with classical, shattered, vaguely post-apocalyptic black-and-white photographs. Sometimes the photographs are visible, and sometimes the panels are lit and rotated to become screens or mirrors. Ariadne is the only character, though at times her thoughts, feelings, and hallucinations are made manifest by ghostly dancers wielding abstract silver props.

Beginning with the delicately heartbroken refrains of Haydn's Arianna a Naxos, Ariadne is subsequently plunged into wildly contrasting states of madness, longing, and despair with intertwined selections from the aforementioned Haydn, Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, and Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna. The transitions are jarring, as they are meant to be, especially into and out of Pierrot: from lush Italian cantata to brash, surrealist, overtly anachronistic German modernism. Intensely eerie going in and confusing coming out, the experience was often distracting (why is a Minoan princess singing/seeing clowns, knitting needles, crucifixes, violins? A reminder that she had a life before Theseus engaged in privileged entertainments, lunar worship? Simply the best available choice to depict a mental wilderness?), but that distraction was itself viscerally evocative of having one's reality fall apart. The exhausting highs and lows then intensify the power of Monteverdi's romantic fantasies. Ariadne dances with her own externalized love; she observes and relishes and rampages against her idealized memories of Theseus. She sings of death in the most longing, loving terms. Through the different pieces, Ariadne must realize that Theseus has abandoned her again and again, and each realization is shattering. Lost and in love and enraged, her ultimate salvation is implicit in the dark eroticism of her state--mortal Theseus may have left her to die, but Dionysus, god of madness and abandon, has no choice but must be attracted to, must discover and possess the raw unleashed emotion of this woman.

In performing Ariadne, Emily Langford Johnson seems to realize each transition with her total being--the tones of her voice, the cast of her eyes, the power and direction of her movements--all hauntingly expressive and dramatically choreographed with the phantom players and panels of the set. The expressions, poses, and dances of Armitage Gone! masterfully provide counterpoint, illumination, and hallucinatory interaction to Ariadne's solitude, whether as grey waifs picking at Ariadne and arranging themselves in mocking tableau in the Pierrot segments or as the silver and gold, warmly human duet of the Lamento. Ariadne's crumpled silver dress shows her former wealth and current disorder, its gathered pleats accentuating her movements as she sways, stumbles, and rolls around the stage. She wears down-laden platform boots that raise her above the dancers and give her strength and volume when she stamps her feet in rage. Their appearance is also reminiscent of the fur-covered hooves of the Minotaur, Ariadne's half-brother, whom she herself betrayed when she gave Theseus the means to destroy him. Ariadne's own role as traitor to her parents and her people (in many versions of the myth, Theseus not only defeats the minotaur but subsequently destroys the Cretan fleet) is thus perhaps alluded to but never articulated.

As with all the other elements of the production, the orchestration was perfectly in step with the mood of each piece and the overall effect of deranged beauty. Especially notable was the rich yet delicate strumming of the theorbo, a beautiful instrument similar to a harpsichord strung onto a mandolin, which provided the only accompaniment to the Haydn arias and was placed literally outside the orchestra, in front of the stage.

Ariadne Unhinged was produced by the Gotham Chamber Opera and performed in the intimate and ornate Playhouse at the Abrons Arts Center in the Lower East Side. Each theatrical element--music, voice, set, costume, dance--accentuated the emotions of the opera and wove themselves into an organic, if rupturing, whole. Sadness, madness, and melodrama in a wilderness of loss and solitude.