Tacking in Muddy Waters
The operatic spectacle Metapolis II combines a few uncomplicated elements. No simple achievement. This gesamtkunstwerk's subject is architecture—plainly painted in bold strokes of video, sculpture, music, and movement, in that hierarchy. It left an impression of anomie and of the very lack of humanity it sought to warn us of. With contrasting means, the work presents contrasted ideology. Live dancers and solo violin—plus looming, God-like video projections of live-fed, larger-than-life virtual dancers superimposed on images of drab, uninspired urban architecture—equals humanity swallowed by industry and technology.
The dancers are dwarfed by their images and their architectural environment screened on the cyclorama. The live performers are at a distinct disadvantage without the enhancing mediation and commentary provided in the videography, attributed to Jean-Christophe Aubert and Pino Pipitone. Clearly lighting it is a challenge and the live dancing suffers in this regard. The Protagonists, humanity and life, are embodied. But looming images of impersonal Bauhaus style, boxy concrete architecture, or the visual din of city lights overwhelms. After some time has passed, the theme emerges with clarity when a topless Agnès Lascombes, sitting on a phosphorescent blanket, looking upstage at her vulnerability magnified on the cyclorama, in an image of her naked body flying backwards through a tunnel of speeding cars. We empathize, perhaps recalling an archetypal dream of finding ourselves naked in a crowd.
This illusion of passage from real to the multiple possibilities of virtual time and space gives Metapolis II continuity, as does the solo violinist George van Dam, who plays during most of the seventy-minute performance, sometimes along with a sound collage of various rock, folk, and classical music. Even in the dissonant phrases, van Dam's violin is totally apt, with measures of poignancy and poetry. He plays classical or new [End Page 71] music, rife with harmonics and pizzicato, standing in a dark corner just outside the open curtain until the end.
Zaha Hadid's set piece is a marriage of ingenuity and evocation. The lightweight, moveable sculpture of arched, horizontal fiberglass with its silvery reflective patina, is at once a topology and bridge. Sometimes the dancers' arched bodies iterate the form, and elsewhere they dance or lounge on top. In the later incarnation it recalls the set for Nijinsky's L'Après-Midi d'un Faune, as a platform for the dancers' sensuality. When the exquisite Valentina Pace stretches her angular or straight arms sensually, on the set piece in its Faune-like incarnation, the naturalistic beauty of the scene is like a twenty-first-century new dawn, equivalent to Faune's twentieth. Elsewhere Hadid's lightweight sculptural prop is separated, expanded like a Chinese lantern. It is frequently moved and reconfigured by dancers, even while others are dancing on it.
Similarly the imaginative costumes always surprise us and give structure to the dance. They are changed often: phosphorescent green blouse, "grass" skirt of phosphorescent strips slit like the large fiberglass sculpture; the strips fly or fold and expand on the wearer. The set and costumes move and change shape, within the limits of gravity. A columnar Nonoka Kato, wrapped in a glowing green sheet stands on top of the sculpture like Lady Liberty against a ferriswheeling collage of Tokyo lights.
The flow of the performance is vertiginous, the dizzying action only stops when there is some anchor, as when the dancing, or the movie on the cyclorama, stands still. It's as if the perpetual motion is as indisputable as the world turning on its axis. Feelings of stability are few and far between in Metapolis II. Projected images of dancers on a rhomboid floor are turning through illusionistic space. In profile, the...
