Andrew Dickson on the experimental troupe turning opera upside down
It's 8.15pm in downtown Chicago and things are getting ugly. A woman has pinned a man to the floor, someone is having a breakdown, and someone else is cheering from the sidelines. There is much yelling.
The audience, seated in the Museum of Contemporary Art, is transfixed ? and slightly horrified. This scene going spectacularly awry is by the experimental Mexican theatre company Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes, and chaos is entirely the point. The show is called El Gallo, Spanish for "rooster", and carries the subtitle "an opera for actors". But, in fact, El Gallo is not so much opera as anti-opera, a show about the crushed idealism and shabby compromises, the diva-ish tantrums, warring personalities and creative tensions that lie behind many pieces of art. A bit like The X Factor, in other words, but with much better music, thanks to a delicate new chamber score by British composer Paul Barker.
I ask the company's founder and director Claudio Vald�s Kuri what the show, which arrives in Britain this week, is really about. "Real life," he shrugs. "All the things you see in the show happened." Even that fight? "Maybe not the wrestling. Some things I exaggerated. But it is based in reality."
El Gallo began life in 2007 when Vald�s Kuri and Barker decided to collaborate on a new piece. Months of workshops passed, until Vald�s Kuri realised that the process of developing the show should become the show itself. "One day, Paul was trying to make [the cast] sing, and they were tired and making mistakes. It was so obvious Paul wanted to kill them!" That went into the piece, as did a toe-curling re-enactment of the original auditions.
Many musical neuroses are outed on stage. One singer, a baritone, is desperate to sing countertenor, if only the director will listen; another seizes every opportunity to show off her party piece. But there are happier discoveries en route to the finished opera-within-an-opera, performed at the end: a Guadaloupe-born contralto unexpectedly blossoms in Gershwin's Summertime, and one of her male colleagues finds his voice by rediscovering the Iranian folk music of his youth. Most remarkably, the entire opera is performed in an invented language that sounds like a cross between Esperanto and Romanian. Barker explains: "I wrote a series of songs using, instead of lyrics, sounds I thought made sense. We went from there."
Ciertos Habitantes means "certain inhabitants", reflecting the diversity of the group, drawn from 13 different countries. One performer used to be a professional horserider, another a publisher. Although El Gallo's cast had musical training, at least one of their number has never sung in public before.
The troupe is touring another show, Monsters and Prodigies, a spectacular history of castrati ? those boy singers whose testes were removed in order to keep their voices pure and unbroken, and whose skills inspired so much early vocal music. What castrati lost below the waist, they gained elsewhere: the finest became highly paid stars, their androgyny part of their appeal.
Monsters and Prodigies, almost certainly the only study of baroque opera to feature both a live horse and the appearance of Napoleon, was described admiringly by French newspaper Lib�ration as "unclassifiable"; since opening in 2000, it has toured to 16 countries. Vald�s Kuri is pleasantly puzzled by its reception. "We opened it in a subsidised theatre in Mexico, and it was the first time they have ever sold out. Everywhere we have performed it, from [New York's] Lincoln Center to small towns, has seemed fascinated."
He now has plans to create a kind of eco-theatre retreat in the Great Water Forest of central Mexico, but the director's bolder experiments have not always gone down well. Last year, he received a drubbing at the hands of Edinburgh's musical establishment over his staging of the little-known 18th-century opera Montezuma. It was described by the Scotsman as "unfocused and idiosyncratic", by the Guardian as a "surreal trainwreck". Vald�s Kuri is unapologetic: "They asked me to do an opera, but not in a conventional way. I knew I was going to face criticism. Though it made me think, certainly."
Perhaps the experience had unforeseen benefits: after all, as Vald�s Kuri admits, El Gallo is partly a tongue-in-cheek portrait of a clueless director. Isn't it asking for trouble, I wonder, doing something so explicitly about failure? He drains his tea. "Exactly! I love the danger. I love disasters."
? Monsters and Prodigies is at Brighton Dome (01273-709709), tomorrow to Thursday; El Gallo, Saturday and Sunday.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/may/22/teatro-ciertos-habitantes-gallo-monsters
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