“I am entering the hall in a hurry. Good, it hasn’t started yet. Or has it? There is a man on the stage. Is that a man, or a shadow? It must be a man, darkened, with a projected eye behind him. It looks like Miguel. A huge eye. Is it his? I don’t know. It could be; it’s blue. It is watching us and blinking. It multiplies! Now there are many eyes projected on the stage, all staring at me. It is not seduction, it is surveillance - amusing, thoughtful and frightening. The audience is still entering, making a continuous noise. Has it started or not? “S I L Ê N C I O!” the amplified voice screams. Now I am sure it is Miguel. It is almost impossible to mistake the voice (…)”
Azguime’s performance in Salt Itinerary includes talking, mumbling, yelling, reciting, simulating writing, making percussive sounds. It also includes invisible, but audible, electronic interventions made by the author/performer by means of hidden sensors attached to his body, over the sounds produced on stage. His “natural speech” is constantly upgraded by his interventions, using samples of his own voice, processing them, making loops and superimposing processed sound on the live performance. His speech is about the absence of the author, sound, silence, text, body, alienation, voice. Being the author of the text and the music and actor only in the live performance on stage, Azguime is in a position to make a virtuoso questioning of the ideas of authorship of music and libretto in this opera.
It is a digital opera. Both its visual and its sound effects are made by complex digital procedures. Its libretto does not bring a linear narrative. But the drama is on stage, although there is no plot in the classical sense. It is the drama of authorship and its trajectory is not hierarchical, it does not have climaxes and anticlimaxes. It is continual, because everything Azguime does on stage becomes effective on the meta-level and shows the author’s highly-strung existence, called into question in the context of highly developed technology. Since Glass/Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (1976) the institution of opera has entered a new era in its (post)history with various artists showing awareness of and a need to comment on the media age. However, there have not been many digital operas at all resembling Salt Itinerary. Together with rare works such as the schizo-opera One by the Dutch composer Michel van der Aa, and the post-rock performance Speech by Blixa Bargeld, Azguime’s work maps a specific place in this media post-history of the genre. The position it is establishing questions performance art, opera and monodrama, in combination with high technology. Finally, being made into a DVD, it reaches one further level of questioning that must be dealt with.
In the post-industrial media age, opera reflects society’s strategies of power and economy. The media of that reflection is “the finest consumer object, the body” (Baudrillard) and the way it is represented in the world of opera. Miguel Azguime is exhibiting his performing body on stage. On his body, as on the screen, the agonizing drama of the creative process is being shown. We are looking at the body of the author, in pain, convulsion, struggling with the emptiness of silence and tearing the whiteness of the site without words. There is a striking contrast between the drama of authorship being performed on stage and the author’s amusing interventions, which constantly shift the recipient’s engagement from entertaining humour to deep drama.
Perhaps even more seriously than exploring and questioning the status of opera today, Azguime questions the status and effects of the institution of the composer in the media age. Being an artist capable of intervening in different fields simultaneously, he responds to the needs created by today’s age of complex technological demands. Azguime translates the whole compositional process from the sonic sphere to the multimedia event. “Salt Itinerary” could be regarded as meta-composition, composition of composition, or opera on opera. Azguime’s compositional strategy starts from composing the literary text. Then the literary text becomes spoken text, later re-composed by Azguime’s own electronic interventions. Moreover, the sonic matrix is brought together with the live image and projected video interventions.
And what has happened to the voice? The operatic voice was for centuries the only symptom of operatic corporeality. Loud coloratura endlessly rediscovered a masque of its origin, offering itself as an object of desire. It served as a mechanism for hiding the corporeal origin of vocality. The diva was treated as an almost bodiless figure whose body was sublimated in her voice. She was a singing machine; a vocal mechanism captured in a body whose ‘natural’ corporeality was not ‘proper’ for the social norms of the opera world. In Salt Itinerary the voice has been returned to the body and beyond that. The body is supported by digital devices that enhance its possibilities so that Azguime’s figure on stage becomes a kind of sound-cyborg entity.
But whose voice really is on stage? It is not only Azguime’s body that “sings” in this opera. If I recall Roland Barthes’ text The Grain of the Voice, it will become evident that “the grain” is the body in the singing voice, in the writing hand, in the performing limb. Azguime’s body is in a prosthetic relation with the set of devices that support his vocal virtuosity and enable it to perform complex tasks. That vocality goes beyond the author’s body, which is a de-territorialized machine producing an impossible voice that acts as an object of desire. Like salt, the artificial voice makes the taste of this opera enjoyable. While the voice deconstructs the written text, it announces the state of body of the molecular author. It reflects all the dilemmas, searches, secrets, failures, hopes, obsessions, desires and powers of the writer, composer and musician in the world of contemporary western opera.
“(…) finally at home. Not in a hurry, playing the DVD, sitting in front of the TV, I hear the opera. I look at it. The eye is on the screen, watching and mirroring me. The screen becomes my inevitable companion. There is no performing uncertainty in the age of digital reproduction. I could make strange choices - put it louder or quieter, or I could play it on fast forward. The voice is a bet. I think of the DVD as a document of a live performance… But there is more. Intentionally or not, as a DVD, Salt Itinerary strongly questions one more institution – the television show. It works with the television medium and involves it in the process of signification. Live performance has become just a tiny part of the operatic experience. The context modifies the signifying practice. It will never be the same… Good, it hasn’t finished yet. I could always play it again.”
“Voice, The Impossible”
“Salt Itinerary”
Miguel Azguime
Miso Ensemble
Film directed by Perseu Mandillo
CREDITS electroacoustic & multimedia opera
Miguel Azguime: writer, composer, performer
Paula Azguime: staging, video, live-electronics
Andre Bartetzki: video programming
Perseu Mandillo: video directing
miso records (mdvd001.07)
