BY MARK BOSCH
La Passion de Simone (Australian premiere)
The Sydney Chamber Opera and The Song Company
Sydney Festival
Carriageworks, 9 January
The opening evening of the Sydney Festival, I stepped into Carriageworks to be confronted by the overwhelming scale and lustre of American artist Nick Cave’s installation Until.
Carriageworks was buzzing, with patrons exploring the enormous work, having drinks, and waiting for the evening’s two shows to begin – one of which was La Passion de Simone, the oratorio composed by Finnish-French composer Kaija Saariaho. Its French libretto was written by the acclaimed Amin Maalouf, with whom Saariaho has worked on her three other operatic works.
Whereas Until is a work of great aesthetic diversity, director Imara Savage’s staging of La Passion de Simone is pared back, tapping into the asceticism and wilful suffering of the work’s subject: 20th-Century French philosopher and activist Simone Weil. I had known Weil only by name, but I found Maalouf’s careful selection of her ideas, however eclectic, to be highly accessible. But it was in fact a citation made in the program that affected me the most:
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.
Weil did not bind herself to any one school of thought during her short life, but displayed an enchanting capacity for intellectual growth, worldly and spiritual curiosity, and “extreme empathy” for the oppressed. These characteristics have given Weil something of a cult following; a following of which Saariaho is a part. Weil’s La Pesanteur et la grâce (Gravity and Grace), from which the above extract comes, was “one of the few things” the composer packed in her suitcase for Germany in 1981 when she left Helsinki to continue her studies in composition.
Saariaho’s love for the philosopher shows in the score. It’s well constructed, typically sumptuous music, if a bit conservative alongside much of her catalogue. Or perhaps the better word is restrained? Not wanting to fill up the fissures through which the grace embodied by solo soprano Jane Sheldon might pass, the composer abstains from too much timbrally varied, rhythmically complex, or soloistic instrumental writing. Regardless, the score was beautifully rendered by the Sydney Chamber Opera led by Jack Symonds, tucked to one side of Carriageworks’ vast Bay 17 but filling the space with sound without ever overpowering the (admittedly amplified) Sheldon. Of particular note was one of the work’s few instrumental solos, a doleful oboe line impeccably played by Jasper Ly.
But Sheldon surely worked the hardest, and deserves double the recognition for her endurance onstage and onscreen. Always graceful without sacrificing the grit of Weil’s wilful struggles, Sheldon stood at an oblique angle away from the audience, cutting a lonesome figure who would not take so much as a single step for the work’s duration. More often than not, she would seem to convulse under the weight of the world as she sang, although her voice was flawlessly controlled and completely unaffected by her fitful movements. She was simultaneously seen in an enormous projection shot by Mike Daly, first quietly and ever-so-slowly stepping into view before standing similarly still as thousands upon thousands of rice grains (three tonnes, apparently) poured down upon her, no doubt a meditation on those same notions of gravity and grace. At one point, I could swear I saw a single white feather fall among the rice, a modest mountain of which was preserved centre-stage, retaining the ghostly trace of Sheldon having left it to assume the position she held for the entire performance.
As beautiful, appropriate, and initially effective as this minimal staging was, I did come to yearn for Sheldon to take a step, or to fall to the ground, or to turn around and face the audience; all the while knowing in my heart of hearts that she wasn’t going to do any of those things. Conveying Weil’s asceticism and endurance through extreme duration, while brave and certainly well-suited to the desolate performance space, was always bound to be hit-or-miss. What of the labourers and resistance fighters with which she allied herself? Isolating Sheldon onstage risked elevating Weil to an almost messianic status, when she seemed to want rather to lose herself in others. To that end, perhaps the four singers of The Song Company, who sat fairly inconspicuously within the ensemble, could have been staged. A choice like that would have quashed the increasingly invasive thoughts I was having throughout the performance about the potential narcissism of self-martyrdom. Intimately learning the philosopher’s life and work might clarify that seeming paradox for me, but until then, La Passion de Simone prompts me to ask: Did Weil really stand with others, or did she desire, ultimately, to stand alone?
Images supplied: Victor Frankowski.
