The Americans have a word for it: production value. By this you can indicate that a performance is technically perfect. The sound is right, the stage setting is excellent, the costumes are all right, the lighting is superb and the actors, singers and musicians: top notch. Even the extras are at their best. A performance with a high production value So can fail at few things. She can, however, be too perfect. I experienced something like this with Tryptich, the musical theatre show for which Bryce Dessner (The National) wrote the music.
So there is absolutely nothing wrong with this ode to Robert Mapplethorpe. The music, performed by top ensemble Asko|Schönberg, oscillates between pop, blues and medieval, with some modern dissonances here and there. The vocals are divine, as performed by Room Full Of Teeth. We hear references to Monteverdi, to Baptist soul, to Philip Glass. Remarkably, everything is amplified and specially mixed, so that from the stage there is a real wall of sound coming at you. When the bass kicks in, your chair vibrates. So this is quality music, also suitable for pop festivals.
Biblebelt
Mapplethorpe's enormous photographs are brilliantly projected onto gauze cloths, literally layering them. So that makes for a live exhibition of the work of this photographer who shot stars, classic male nudes as well as sm and bondage images bordering on pornography, with an often prominent place for the raised male member. That might be offensive to certain people, but in the Netherlands you have to go deep into the Biblebelt or the Schilderswijk for that, where people don't like pictures of stiff black dicks.
Mapplethorpe's work also sparked a riot in America, where thirty years ago a museum director was jailed for displaying an exhibition by Mapplethorpe in his museum. Texts from the indictment and the court case form the basis of the libretto of this performance, which further, as the hour progresses, also questions the way Mapplethorpe treated his models. Did he actually pay them, and was he not also actually objectifying the black male body? To put that question to the audience properly and without any possible misunderstanding, a young black ballet dancer walks, sits and lies at the front of the stage. Perfect body too, very fine clothes.
Bloody worship service
Which can be a problem on a night with such a high production value, is that it all becomes too much pretty, and has too little heart. And so that happened, despite producing gospel and soul sounds. I was missing a soul, something really wrong, something that could bring air into this blood-serious worship service. I began to long for that wonderfully contrarian performance from last year's Holland Festival, Gesualdo. In it, Theatre Group The Warm Shop placed beautiful counterpoints to the madrigals of this controversial medieval composer, who sacrificed his career to debauchery and murder.
Slightly less production value like, and a little more wild ferocity. Then I would have had a really good evening.
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