Le Crocodile trompeur

/ Didon et Énée

There are architectural languages that are visual transpositions of sound, there are singing/reciting postures that are reserved for the perception of the eye, there are oscillatory counterpoints that are inhabitable in a dimension, in a backdrop, in a stage canon.

The incomparable space of Le Crocodile trompeur / Didon et Énée, a 2013 adaptation by Samuel Achache, Jeanne Candel and Florent Hubert inspired byopera Dido and AEneas with music by Henry Purcell and libretto by Nahum Tate from 1689, takes to reference to Jan Brueghel the Younger's Allegory of Hearing, a 1645-1650 painting, an oil on canvas with instruments hanging on the wall, supported vertically to the ground, reclining on the floor, a chordophone played from a dame, a pianola against the wall, an allegorical but also material vivarium, an anatomy of fantastic and realistic conventions that juxtaposes 17th-century Flemish representational talent with the contemporary montage of a new narrative of music where the instruments become actors to full-fledged, and where the musicians-actors-singers can do it all and fill Purcell's Baroque music for Tate's libretto with performance, jazz and transformism, not excluding assonances with Virgil's Aeneid and Shakespeare's Sonnets, not turning their backs on cinema and the art of documentary filmmaking. But I say more. Here the body of the voice, the grain of the voice, or the voix humaine of the music increasingly somatize the improvisations, the arrangements, the transposed rewrites. And the result often gives rise to patterns of a reloaded remodulation, to new relationships with the environment, to unthinking intellectual and emotional approaches.

Le Crocodile trompeur / Didon et Énée directed by Samuel Achache and Jeanne Candel is not afraid to provoke, to question Purcell'sopera by addressing it while neglecting or rejecting the style of the era. The enterprise manifests the explicit purpose of earthquaking its connotations, as when one measures oneself with the meaning of an ancient tragedy by differentiating its conventional appointments, its accumulated lexicon. For this endeavor, the tuning, the conjuncture between minimalism and spectacularity was deliberately broken up, an attempt was made to ensure the overall machine a continuous gap between the search for the fantastic and realistic imprinting. And the announced experimental criterion was therefore adhered to to a trend of counterpoint. That is why the dissociation of Jan Brueghel the Younger's visual delusions is invoked with subtext that implies loving, leaving, devouring, letting oneself die. That is why music becomes action, plastic dramaturgy, derubricating the etymology and consonance of grande musique. To assert itself, here, is an asystematicity. They warn, they let it be known that to a singer may be asked to descend from opera singing to simple singing, to humming, when not even to spoken singing. to times it will seem to be attending to a lecture on contemporary instruments. to times an extreme dryness will prevail. to times instead certain values have been contracted, but in some cases they have undergone a protraction of time to due to score insertions or infiltration of commentary. Interdisciplinarity is a very fluid criterion especially if, as is the case with the adaptation and direction of Le Crocodile trompeur / Didon et Énée, all artists participating as creators and performers are in practice deemed co-authors.

In addition to the regeneration, retranscription and musical reassembly, the present literary representation then gains prominence in this new operatic enterprise. It might even have been surprising, originally, the linearity of Nahum Tate's libretto, where the feelings, affections and passions of a Dido queen of Cartagne (who struggles against her falling in love with Aeneas despite her own oath of fidelity to her dead husband, and yet eventually relents) and an Aeneas to whom a spirit in the form of Mercury reminds him of his destiny to be founder in Italy of a future nation are sharp, controversial and then fatal. In Purcell-Tate'sopera the two intimate, symbiotic and incompatible protagonists were not given the right to psychological nuances, attitudinal half-tones, introspective circumstances. Certain fatalities were, in short, rigid and devoid of human suggestion. Dido's death out of grief, when Aeneas sets out again, obeying first the gods and then essentially to her (who reluctantly submits to fate), was on purpose in 1689 an act without any deepening, it was almost the counterpart of a courageous, defiant theatrical cruelty, and today that essentiality is respected but other mediating valen- ts come into play. Which ones? To the objectivity of lexicon and action Le Crocodile trompeur / Didon et Énée can annex subtleties that in the 21st century resort to to a more modulated meaning of music, to a less haughty sonic illustration of spasms. It is worth to to say that here the original ingle- se baroque yields functionally and epidermically to a patient and imaginative craftsmanship of our years, to an exhilarating and natural wildness, at the beginning of a transformative and unbalanced jam session, launching an indiscipline, an exuberance an energetic orchestra of double bass, clarinet, saxophone, violin, trumpet and drums (also tribute from dj-set that set designer Lisa Navarro makes to the painting of Jan Brueghel the Younger) whose credit is due to the extraordinary glue of music director Florent Hubert, in line with Jeanne Sicre's choral direction.

But there is still, underlying this production by de la vie brève/ Théâtre de l'Aquarium and the prestigious Théâtre du Bouffes du Nord in Paris, a philosophical connotation, a cosmopolitan multilingualism, an experimental daring and a skillful d'ora interplay between stage music and sound drama, an off-catalog genre in which contemporary Italy and France can compete, perhaps with some pre-scindent recklessness from genres in which we might admit in a whisper that the transalpines have no shame. Then there is the team on the field, a dozen spe- cialists who wear the jersey and play the role of libero surprising, creating, playing the acting, interpreting the scores. And the directors have been practicing theater and sound.

Samuel Achache worked with Hungarian stage genius Árpád Schilling, an apprenticeship also shared from Jeanne Candel. The two of them, Achache and Candel, in addition to Crocodile trompeur/ Didon et Énée (awarded the Molière in 2014 for best musical theater performance), signed from Claudio Monteverdi Orfeo/Je suis mort en Arcadie at the Comédie de Valence, and La chute de la maison excerpted from Poe, Schubert and Schumann at the Festival d'Automne. Samuel Achache sculpts music at the 2015 Festival d'Avignon, directed Théatre de l'Aquarium and then founded the company Le Sourde. Jeanne Candel co-directs the Théatre de l'Aquarium, collaborates with the Opéra de Lyon, Opéra Comique, and Opéra de Paris, and creates the company la vie brève.

Rodolfo di Giammarco