This year’s Spier Arts Summer Season has faraway been the best to date. The team under Annebelle Schreuders are to be highly commended for a solid program, of quality work, covering a wide range of genres and styles, some of it cutting edge.
Amongst these I would single out Pulcinella, directed by the inimitable Marthinus Basson. It’s a playful piece with a cast of diverse characters, exploring their desires, aspirations, and relationships. It combines spoken text, dance and opera.
Pulcinella was composed as a ballet by Igor Stravinsky in 1920. It doesn’t sound anything like the Stravinsky I know. It is tuneful, often comic. Most of the music is in fact based on compositions attributed to the 17th century composer Pergolesi and by Domenico Gallo. Conductor, Xandi van Dijk, has done a fine job with the Spier Chamber Orchestra, and typical to Basson’s eccentric style – well suited to the character of Stravinsky – van Dijk is also required to act and to interact with the stage cast. This includes some hilarious histrionics with soprano Zane Stapelburg.
Samantha Pienaar has produced some of the finest choreography I have seen on the South African stage in a while. It is eclectic, diverse, striking in its balletic transposition of the normal movements that human beings make in daily life, and even draws on images in nature – like male antelope rutting. The cast of ten dancers include the wonderful Mark Hoeben, and a real baby in nappies with milk bottle. It’s an audacious move, that adds incredible dramatic effect, especially when the child is abandoned crying on the stage for a few seconds and the audience is helpless to intervene. It is moments like this, that have always set Basson apart from the crowd.
Performed on a painted grid, somewhere between a board game and a sport’s court, the famous images of movement filmed by Eadweard Muybridge are projected on to the back wall – textured like peeling paint. The surtitle translations of the arias also appear here.
Basson’s script is masterful. Using the psychological reductionism of R.D. Laing, he has built a series of monologues through the tricky semantic rearrangement of a limited series of words – dealing in syllogisms, sometime paralogical, contrapositions, contradictions and exploding bivalences. Such as R.D. Laing’s famous “I love you because I need you, I need you because I love you.”
It is whimsical, refreshing, intelligent work.
If you missed Pulcinella, it’s worth asking, “Where were you? What were you doing instead?”
