Operatic response to an art exhibition
Performance by
Infinite Opera
Infinite Opera was commissioned by Barber Institute to produce a piece for their series of Nocturnes, on the St. Ives exhibition: Cornwall as Crucible, with special focus on Naum Gabo’s sculpture: Linear Construction 1.
This is the second piece Infinite Opera has created as a response to another artists work (the first being in response to Drye Eyes), particularly for performance within the gallery setting.
This micro-opera was structured in a way that would include the entire gallery space, as well as the exhibition space itself. In order to achieve this, we decided to split the event into two parts. The first would consist of a parade around the gallery space, and the second would be a kind of ritual in the exhibition space and in front of the sculpture.
Performance - 3rd March 2020
The idea behind this work was to respond to the artistic ideas of Naum Gabo, especially those by the time he was in St. Yves.
Musically I responded to his sculpture by following the shape of the string in several ways: the singer represents the line as you watch it (accompanied by the same line that appears in parallel and behind in different angles) and recites Naum’s manifestos; the trumpet is the string itself, constant but changing using different transpositions; the flute responds to the movement of the line from a different perspective and creates a three-part structural frame for the piece; the violin represents the physicality of the sculpture, it imitates the sound of the nylon string when plugged (pizzicati in the extreme high register of the violin or in harmonics) and imitates the journey of the string.
Excerpts of the performance at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, at the University of Birmingham.
About the layering, the instruments were placed separately in the different galleries of the space creating the sensation of echoes alongside the performance. This relates to the strings that you see behind and next to the string when you follow it, but that they are at the same time, the same string. That informs the main Scene.
There is a Variation, where all the instrumentalists perform together in the same space. Musically it responds to the different variations that Naum Gabo created of “Linear Construction in Space No 1”, in which he gradually changed the structural support removing all what it was unnecessary. Similarly, in the Variation, the original material is reduced to the necessary, to remain faithful to the original sculpture: the line, the body and its structure.