Silenzio! Fierce Festival, CBSO Centre, supported by Centrala, Friday 18 October, 2024, 5✩✩✩✩✩. Review: Dan Auluk.
Photo Credit: Maurycy Stankiewicz.
Silenzio! Fierce Festival, CBSO Centre, supported by Centrala, Friday 18 October, 2024,
5✩✩✩✩✩. Review: Dan Auluk.
Duration: 60 mins
“Intense, humorous and reclaiming power in performance.”
Ramona Nagabczyńska’s performance for Fierce places opera and women at its core, using this historically unchanging art form to explore female voices. Reconnecting voices with symbolic meanings, and not forgetting their physical essence from a place of strength and defiance. Voices that defy the symbolic order or state of play are often dismissed by patriarchal societies and attitudes. Traditional female singing practices have been overshadowed by operatic arias crafted largely by male composers and power dynamics and outdated traditional viewpoints, where vocal freedom and movement are often oppressed.
Nagabczyńska also references aischyrology, an ancient Greek practice rooted in feminine rituals involving obscene language which is handled to delightful and shocking humour in traditional outdated ideas and preceptions of Ladies and Gentlemen, outdated in itself. Silenzio takes the political power of the voice and reconnects this to the physical presence of the body.
As an opener, the intensity of holding a pose, from the four performers, each freeze framed in a moment, was intense and uneasy but not without humour which breaks our own silence for release. The choreography throughout was effortlessly performed with an extremely high level of energy and care. I cannot imagine the countless hours spent in rehearsing just the beginning poses. Strike a pose indeed! Holding poses for what seemed like an extraordinarily long duration generated a spectacle of an unsettling painful and often violent; yet playfulness spreading across the large baron stage of the CBSO, a setting as Grandeur was certainly fitting. The large space was confidently used by all the performers, a testimony to how much energy was expended. The silence slowly unravels, first with facial expressions and then into subtle movement of the body until chaos and freedom is unleashed.
The use of voice as power, humour with explicit language and translation, humility and reign were surprising and fierce! The body and voice becoming one, a somatic approach to expression and a dismantling of patriarchy and tradition, often in ironic violent gestures, resurrecting to form new bodies in flux and freestyle, queering up our sense of space. The release of this energy in movement, asynchronous and abstractly peculiar, shifts to a costume change, that take us back from the contemporary present to the historical past and a direct vulgar yet competitive humour and direct address to audience and place; the gaze turned outwards was sharp and fun.
I’ve always wanted to go to the Opera, but I wonder now if I will ever be able to shake off this performance and awareness, with knowing what I have witnessed and learnt. In the Q+A we were all challenged by an audience member to name 5 male composers and 2 women composers – there was a silence.
Silenzio is certainly a brilliant piece of choreography of voice and movement that grabs your attention from the beginning to end. The silence here is loud and unapologetic. I didn’t want it to end! Bravo! Fantastica!
Credits
Choreography: Ramona Nagabczyńska
Performers and Co-Creators: Katarzyna Szugajew, Karolina Kraczkowska, Barbara Kinga Majewska, Ramona Nagabczyńska / Anna Steller
Dramaturg: Agata Siniarska
Music: Lubomir Grzelak
Vocal Parts Production: Barbara Kinga Majewska
Scenography and Costumes: Dominika Olszowy
Assistance with Costumes and Scenography: Dominika Święcicka
Lights Direction: Jędrzej Jęcikowski
Tailor: Emil Wysocki
Baroque Dance Teacher: Marta Baranowska (Cracovia Danza)
Partners: Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, Centrum w Ruchu
This performance was created as part of the Poszerzanie Pola project, in association with the Art Stations Foundation in Poznan.
Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage from the Cultural Promotion Fund