Tiago Rodrigues is a bard. Evidenced by the first opera he staged, at the Opéra national de Lorraine, in Nancy: to the music and text of the tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner, the new boss of the Festival d’Avignon has written a long story, an elegy of love and death. Tristan and Isolde are no longer the heroes of a tragedy but the incarnations of a myth that predates them. Their very identity has been lost. He is “the sad man”, she “the sad woman”. So sad that singing becomes a diversion for them. Even before the prologue, two dancers stroll in silence within an immense white library of archives in the shape of a semicircle. Dressed in blue blouses, these zealous “translators” extract with protective gloves large white panels (some 947), both stories and mantras, which counterpoint the Wagnerian discourse. Chance of the calendar, this device concentrates the glossator principle developed on this same Tristan and Isolda in 2005 by the videos of Bill Viola and the staging of Peter Sellars at the Opéra Bastille, a production currently resuming until Saturday 4 February.
The audacity of Tiago Rodrigues (some will see it as an avoidance) is perilous but seductive. From this silence clothed in words is born the music of the Prelude that Sofia Dias and Vitor Roriz choreograph face to face – gazes, attraction, golden light, hands brushing against each other, the mental flight of lovers. A strange poetry sets in, embodied by moving bodies, themselves punctuated by action. An almost muddled rush of barely legible signs as the boat, which is bringing Isolde back to the dying Tristan, is finally in sight. Sometimes the word becomes an object: death potion, love potion, or else sword, the chipped one that slew Isolde’s fiancé in battle, the one that will kill the traitor Melot, as well as the impotent Kurwenal, after fatally wounding Tristan. Sometimes the “mute reciter” joins the singer.
These are moments of irresistible compassion, as when the dancer embraces a Tristan of pain gradually won over by the shadow of death, who will see his corpse covered with the white blades of the story. Sometimes Tiago Rodrigues seems to get away. Perhaps he is quietly ironic, nothing is certain, about the overflow of words (to which he brings his own share), the too much music, the too much love, the time-consuming love. As in music, he creates leitmotifs, introduces the parable, inviting Wagner to the universal.
The text of the singers is not subtitled, but the writing of Tiago Rodrigues acts as its shadow, even a metalanguage which absorbs without dissolving the Wagnerian prosody, draws other coherences, rid of amphigourism and rehashing, develops a new view. Is she staging in the literal sense? It offers a path and a literary imagery capable of stirring up the critical narration of what is being played out. By putting the spectator at the heart of the show, she propagates and fights both the influence and the Wagnerian enterprise in a dialectic that conveys emotions.
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