Who’s Afraid of Ulrich Rasche, who presented this January 25 at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, with Elektra of Strauss, his first opera production? Or rather an impressive and virtuoso lyrical adaptation of a first work produced around the eponymous play by the poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal (also a colibrettist of the opera), staged in 2019 at the Residenztheater in Munich.
The German director (born in 1969), also a scenographer, who occasionally works for the Burgtheater in Vienna, imagined a visual universe made up of enormous assemblies of metal, lights and cogs. Gigantic infernal dark black tower (12.8 tons of steel), cylindrical cage, treadmills and helicoidal ramps, rotating discs, tilting lifting platforms. An infernal machinery, which imprisons the protagonists in an inexorable cybernetic movement according to an endless march, like the curse of the Atrides perpetuating death and revenge over generations.
No less than two choreographers to adjust and regulate this slow ballet of wanderings with a hypnotic effect
Attached like wild animals to the lanyard, or like rock climbers to their zip line, strictly harnessed in black, the singers move in height, as if placed in orbit in the center of the scenic space. A monumental steel capsule with transparent or opaque trellises depending on the play of light is sometimes docked, illuminating the disturbing duel between Elektra and her mother, Clytemnestra, hiding the double murder of her, then of Aegisthus, by Orestes, avenging son of Agamemnon.
No less than two choreographers to adjust and regulate this slow ballet of wanderings with a hypnotic effect. From the tightrope walker flexibility of Elektra, sometimes braced, like a wrestler, the better to devour space, to the almost robotic locomotion of Orestes, who appeared as the instrument of destiny. From the elegant and fluid progression of Queen Clytemnestra, a seductress in wide flowing trousers, to the desperate vehemence of Chrysothemis, a girl with white breasts in a burst of a virgin in search of love and a child. Rotation speeds, variations in inclined planes, reversals of the directions of travel, displacements according to a tectonic human relationship, between hierarchies and dependencies, effectively settle the question of the actor’s direction. The rising round of servants, almost threatening, will form a guard around Clytemnestra before the reverse movement of a tearful procession signals the accomplishment of the matricide.
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