ISABELLA BORDONI / ROBERTO PACI DALÓ LINGUA MADRE A paper on: opera & digital technology, languages & translation, voice & text, and the dangers of radio For Demetrio Stratos
LINGUA MADRE: PRELUDE I I have been thinking long and laboriously about a contribution to this symposium but I couldn't get over a difficulty. The difficulty was to arrive here with a contribution which would fit the theme without blurs and logical leaps. Then I decided not to bother. The result is a contribution full of thoughts which constantly stray from the theme - and with many logical leaps. My problem was and is, that for a theoretical approach I had to step out of my own world, to cross a territory beyond my own identity. I thought: in my daily routine I use something ancient and something modern. I use writing with its rudimentary but primary and irreplaceable tools, pen and paper. I use my own body. I use my own voice and I use space. I employ physical space when it is a theatre, concert hall, or recording studio, and I use machines. Machines allow the space I use to shift from a physical to a non-physical one. On the air. Ancient civilisations called it Ether, that higher, pure and bright part of space beyond the limit of the earth's atmos-phere. That is the Primo Cielo, but this word (meant to define a particular space) reminds one of a peculiarity of Time. "They called the place 'excelso etere' and they gave it this name because it always flows."1 But why is the thought of technology, of a philosophy of technology, difficult for me to express, or only temporarily access-ible to me? I had no answers at first, so I lived with this difficulty and in this way, little by little, words came back to me. Appearance Ether Feminine And the process of combining these words and their opposites. I can only speak of this because, with all its particularity, this is my own experience. The idea of appearance and truth not only as a duality, but as open worlds influencing each other, is an idea that has pursued me since 1989. "Temporale" (a theatre piece) was composed as a note about Time and had "appearance and the return" as a subtitle. At that time an "ego" was dramatically set, searching for a world which would reveal beneath mere appearance its true essence. But what is the borderline between that which seems to be and that which is real? Maybe living in a common place makes us recognise things, understand events? But appearance or "parvenza "- even if the moral interpretation implies deceit - is rather an "appearance" and is already a thing in the tangible (real) world. Many other things have cut across these years, in myself as an individual and as a part of a thinking community, many ideas have crossed and stayed, more or less productively, in the world of art and sciences and thought. In the collective consciousness there is an upheaval in the perception of time and space thanks - but not only - to a type of information and communication processing that are becoming telematic. In myself - and this is recent - a motherhood. Even before this, and now together with this - and I am grateful for it - I now experience a direct contact with a feminine genealogy practically and symbolically (not metaphor, but symbol) experienced. Experienced... experienced... and that redraws the whole map of a new and ancient sense of Time and Space. I believe this to be a typically feminine attitude, one of living, more or less happily, the paradox of thought, taking care of the details and open to the alchemy of change when change must come. I believe the central point is this: how can these two paths of the absolutely ancient and the absolutely new live together? Two paths crossing two genders, the feminine and the masculine, always engaged in different tensions, one in preserving, the other in operating, one in belonging to a world often unshared, the other in moving in the public sphere. I don't ask myself if there is a writing, a theatre, a politics or a technological scene which is feminine because now I know they exist. I know it today, after years of believing in an idea of equality, which nevertheless left me disoriented through my incapacity to practice it. Unexpectedly, the painful certainty of a distance arose in me, the idea of a practice and thought about the difference. Distance and gender are not in the object or rather they are not there 'a priori'. But in a product they can be there or not be there but - and this I want to emphasize - they are in the origin, in the archetypal forms. Always. Every thought is following this. Every thought following this carries the memory of an upheaval imprinted in its genetic patrimony. That one of Time which Science knows ordination, simultaneity, duration. That one of Time in which is placed the feminine history of generation, enigma and tale of the origin which perpetuates itself. Because in Time (literally) we grasp the word, and in Time (literally) we learn to talk. "Language is my human effort. By fate I have to go and search, by fate I come back empty-handed. Yet, I come back with the 'unspeakable'. The unspeakable can be given to me only through the failure of my language".2 The Unspeakable is preserved in the heart itself of the Word. Agamben writes in Idea della prosa quoting a statement by Paul Celan: "Only in our mother language can we speak the truth. In a foreign language the poet lies." I would like to take two things into consideration here: First the relationship between language and motherhood. In the vernacular: we say mother-tongue, pregnant thought, to conceive of an idea - thinking nourishes, then the waiting, then the word is the birth.- Then the lie. There is a place where we can stay that is not exactly the place of lies but rather a place of partiality and of loss. Languages, different languages, do not coincide. The function of translating is not one of creating copies. Creating copies would mean to believe that an original exists and therein lies the Truth. To stay a foreigner in a language is to broaden loss and error. But why and when is the language a mother? The Italian philosopher and researcher Luisa Muraro, writes in her beautiful book L'ordine simbolico della madre: "from our mother we have learned to talk and she has granted the language its capacity to say what it is." "We learn to speak from our mother, the matrix of life is also the matrix of the word." "I state that to be (or have) a body and to be (or have) the word are one thing and that the work of the mother consists precisely in that whole." The word as an act of creation. "To know how to speak basically means to know how to bring the world into the world and this we can do in relation to the mother, not separately from her." Let's go back to the dawn of modernity and back to the masculine and feminine. First radio, then TV transported the outer to the inner, inside the home, inside the place of individual reflection, into a territory of the feminine. Woman is the cell of inner thoughts, of inwardness, of the Home. But not only: woman is the Abode (I think about the Madonna della Misericordia by Piero della Francesca) First Radio and then TV make the home the centre of information establishing an interpenetration, interpenetration between outside and inside, between masculine and feminine. Today radio and TV technique belong to archaeology. I can only partly grasp and interpret things happening today. There is a further trespass, a further interpenetration of different worlds: the micro is host to the infinitely vast and immaterial. What will be the result of the new meeting, encounter, trespass? Which language will we learn for the community that will come ? PRELUDE II
In the 70s Stratos wrote: "The material recorded here must be understood as proposals for freeing the use of the voice as naturally as possible. For this reason no 'technological tricks' have been taken into consideration: only a piece of string, a Rizla cigarette paper and a glass of water. If a 'new vocality' can exist, it must be experienced by everybody, and not just by one person; an attempt to free oneself from the condition of listener and spectator, to which culture and politics have accustomed us. This work must not be taken as a listening experience to undergo passively, 'un jeu dans lequel on risque la vie' [but as a game in which one risks one's life]".
Time is changing. When Demetrio Stratos adds this comment to his recording Metrodora the technology still looked difficult to access. Now we can work on relatively inexpensive miniature technologies easy to transport and, for anybody who wants to deal with "democratisation of access" are, in Max Neuhaus' phrase, "... a simple means to an end".
And Stratos also posed important questions in Italy about tradition and modernity and the political/social approach to art and daily life.
TEATRO DELL'ASCOLTO
AURORAS is an opera where the main character cannot appear on stage because the protagonist is the Radio,the radiophonic media in a scenic context, within the tradition of opera yet with an up-to-date "intermedia" structure. The composition is based on the voice. The opera is strictly related to language, the language of all ages. Voices of kids, voices of the old, voices in between. Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, German, English, Russian, Hungarian, Greek, Armenian, Yiddish, Persian: language generates a spontaneous polyphony. The original text acquires infinite shapes and meanings through the translation into these different languages: on their "voice" the entire musical structure is built. As the French philosopher Marc-Alain Ouaknin writes: "La vérité n'est ainsi ni du côté de l'original ni de celui de la traduction, mais dans un au-delà des deux qui les transforme tous les deux. La traduction, le nouveau texte, n'est pas la reproduction de l'original, il devient autre chose qu'un produit assujetti à la loi de la reproduction. Lorsque Rabbi Nahman affirme que 'la sainteté de l'hébreu dépend de sa traductibilité en araméen', (l'autre langue), il signifie par là que l'oeetre-à-traduire et le acré ne se laissent pas penser l'un sans l'autre... Ils se produisent l'un l'autre au bord de la même limite. La traduction conduit deux langues l'une vers l'autre dans une promesse de conciliation."3 AURORAS is an opera which returns the melodrama to its origin: the fairy-tale dimension. It is a story to tell.. Those stories which already contain all the questions that move people, pushing them to return once more. The more personal the thoughts, the more they reflect the universal questions about Birth, about Love, about Death. [Rabbi Nahman from Breslau decided to burn all his books, just to become a storyteller again.]
In AURORAS the singers are evocations of the traditional opera singer's role.
A LECTURE UPON THE SHADOW
In the history of the performing arts, opera always dealt with the newest technologies and the opera remains the perfect place to develop the relationship between text, sound, space. In one word: "multimedia". AURORAS is a sound environment with voices and instruments coming from several different sources: radio signals, voices not classically trained, electroacoustical ensemble, with live electronics for their continuous modification and spatialisation. Speaking, singing, telling voices - voices modified.
In AURORAS the body reveals itself as an incomplete machine. Here the body is very close to contemporary thought and far away at the same time, in equal, opposite measure.
Different languages allow different ways of presenting a text.
In AURORAS we have a continuous anamorphosis made out of the superimposition of soundscapes from the cities of Berlin and Napoli, both places provoking specific acoustical memories.
THE DANGERS OF RADIO
THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS Woody Guthrie's guitar is still valid. Expanding its boundaries of course, to include not just fascism but any government control which seeks to limit personal and collective freedom. We view the radio receiver through Guthrie's testament. Sergio Messina's Radio Gladio is a masterpiece of easy listening, a strongly political documentary piece. Exactly now is the time to be involved. Exactly now is the time to be political. The Radio can be a place for the other voices. The utopia of Theatre as one community. Theatre as place of conflicts.
GETTING MULTIMEDIA
Giovanni has said that he doesn't really want to be plugged-in with everything, just with 'something'. He would prefer to make his choices in his own time (internal/external) in order to use the new toys in his own way. We like to think about technology as something which has lightness, precision, speed - all titles of Calvino's American Lessons, written for the Norton Lectures at Harvard University.
But people can get literally sick from an overload of information. To know everything, everywhere, all at once, has become a password, to be 'on-line', 'up-to-date'. And then? Thus the "partiality" of the radio, its very limits becomes one of its most interesting features. On August 30, 1993 - with LA LUNGE NOTTE (The Long Night) - the cities of Jerusalem, Cologne, Innsbruck and Rimini were connected in one space. Musicians and singers worked together on live voices by the poets Samih al-Qasim, Palestinian, and Yehuda Amichai, Israeli, coming over a radio bridge between Italy and Israel (from radio 'Kol Israel'). That night Yehuda Amichai said that the event was the first baby born into the new era. Of course the signal was not pure but whatever the loss from a technical point of view, it makes this piece particularly touching. We can "feel" the distance. We can feel the desert. In the development of art projects in electronic space today, we cannot avoid the beauty of a continuous interchange between old and new technologies. In REALTIME (1993) the image is again not corresponding to the technology. Clearly old fashioned costumes referred to the beginning of television broadcasting, in order to establish a discordance between the image, the sound and the concept as a whole.
In 1992 the performance LA NATURA AMA NASCONDERSI, linked the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna with the Tiroler Landesmuseum in Innsbruck by a high-tech video and audio bridge. Simultaneously a traditional Hungarian ensemble with singer and string players plus an old actor in Vienna appeared with a children's choir plus musician and actress in Innsbruck, the latter controlling the sound and video trans-mission. Map of parallel projects surrounding AURORAS:
- Lectures. Berlin, Cologne, Innsbruck
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