Singapore Arts Festival 2008 commenced at Boat Quay with French street theatre Ilotopie’s aquatic spectacle “Water Fools”. The three-day outdoors evening show drew the total of 30,000 spectators—a smart way to kick off the festival that attempts to prove that arts can take place anyway and is indeed for anyone. 

Six days later at the Esplanade Theatre, the Asian premiere of modern ballet “Arhitektura tišine” (“The Architecture of Silence”) was billed as the festival’s opening gala performance.

                                                                                    

                                    

Featuring more than 130 ballet dancers, choir, and opera singers from two national ballet and opera companies from the cities of Maribor and Ljubljana, in addition to the 66-member Singapore Festival Orchestra, I had the highest number of artists ever performed on this world-renowned stage and was fittingly an opening act for the region’s most highly acclaimed festival.

Numbers aside, performing to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Requiem in D Minor, KV 626” and Zbigniew Preisner’s “Requiem for My Friend” were the ensemble technically advanced and physically stalwart dancers lithely moving through an almost bare stage. Upstage, were rows of choir singers on the stand who, dimly yet astonishingly lit, at many moments looked like candles. On a box, house left, occasionally appeared the opera singers and their potent voice filled this acoustically superb hall.

Edward Clug, the Romania-born 35-year-old house choreographer and head of ballet of the Slovene National Theatre Ballet Maribor, revealed in an exclusive interview with The Nation that it all started with the music.

“A theatre patron and a good friend of mine said that she had this dream that somebody, either a choreographer or a theatre director, would do a performance on three Requiems, by Mozart, Saint-Saëns, and Preisner. I listened to the combination of them, that she had a musicologist put in a musically logical order, and I had nothing to hang on, and was quite confused.”

“When I listened to it again, I realized that it’s so powerful, mythical, and complete that it didn’t need any visual prolongation or decorative element in order to experience it. I was afraid to even touch it. Later on, I didn’t know exactly when this cut [to use only Mozart’s and Preisner] happened. It came out of logical order. Somehow I decided to work on only these two composers, and it’s like two friends talking.”

“I approached the director of the Ljubljana Festival, Slovenia’s largest festival, and he’s interested in the idea, but still it wasn’t meant to be a co-production [with the National Theatre Opera Ljubljana]. Then, I talked to the music director Uros Lajovic and suggested that we use Mozart’s Requiem only until the eighth bar, followed by Preisner’s Offertorium. When I listened to this part of the music, they matched wonderfully. I could also feel the distance, contrast, and silence between them. And from that moment I started to think about the silence and the connection between the two of them. I imagined Mozart creating this in silence, the way he understood the silence, and put it together, the same for Preisner. Then, I came up with the title, with each of them being ‘The Architect of Silence’ with each note creating it.”

Concurrently, Clug was working with his dancers in the choreography. He said, “I wasn’t thinking about the production then, but was just focusing on the movement of each individual dancer and trying to achieve more than just narrative moments. Of course, later on, I had to put them in the context of the production.”

One of the most striking and recurring images was that of fish, and the audience could strongly feel this even before a woman in white dress stood behind a water tank downstage right dropping pebbles into it. Clug explained, “The image of fish came to my mind when I was thinking about the swimmer costumes, which were not just a fashion statement. It actually symbolizes the fish, the water, and the silence. And since there are two companies performing, they would all look homogenized, and people won’t be able to tell who’s from which company.”

                                

                                 

                               

“Although the context of the ‘Requiem’ had its roots in Christianity, I wasn’t looking to make a religious statement. I wanted to create a journey between life and death, well actually not even death but something in between like purgatory. I like its open dimension and personal experience. I looked at it very unclear but very sincere. You can see the black suits with purple stripes, which is the colour of the Catholic church, and then the dancers started to take these suits off. I started on this level, but I decided not to write about it. It’s still not a story. I wanted to let every one have their own journey as I think anyone can understand it.”

The National Arts Council, the festival’s organizer, made a bold decision in highlighting the company and the choreographer not yet widely known in this part of the world. In the end, it was met with thunderous applause and critical acclaim.

written by Pawit  Mahasarinand

published in The Nation on Tuesday, June 24, 2008     

photos courtesy of National Arts Council