Daniel Y.
Yelp
The Almeida building was originally a Salvation Army citadel, but these days it comes off more like a boutique monastery. Wearing its contemplation in tasteful metal greys, big glass doors connect street and open-plan foyer (water is free, but un-iced), the atmosphere is one of an unfussy civic religiosity. Posh, but unprepossessing enough to suggest surprise - it's a theatre afterall, and theatres are all for defying their architecture.
Not much more architecturally defiant than Carmen Disruption (£9 cheap seats, oblique but expansive view, excellent value), which turns the theatre into a microoperahouse hosting a dismantling of Bizet's opera by #teamSimonStephens.
You're really there.
We entered the auditorium thru backstage, across Chloe Lamford's post-industrially nude set, bricks and bare lights, which eventually falls open in a way that makes the film Birdman look like an unattended Gopro at a school nativity play. And we sat, as chandeliers trembled like exposed nerves, silver and rubble fluttered from cracks in the heavens, & oil seeped from under a giant breathing bull carcass lying centrestage.
Opera singing, as close as this, is powerful biz. Physical biz. It's the hue and cry of the street. Unruly, it brings the upper floors of music into the basements of sheer sound. Sound rushes and escapes through cracks. It finds ways to push u away from yourself. It is unorderly and the singer's control returns an unlikely, beautiful, but only ever partial order.
The action has the recognisable Simon Stephens locus of a strange - calcifying at times and hyperspeed at others - city, where the well of social gravity whirls its characters towards the plughole. It's public/private space.
I was thinking: there's a difference between 'deconstruction' & 'disruption'.
'Deconstruction' is a favoured term of legacy theatre critics, who suggest there is a proper way to do things, and experiments consist of peeling away to create deviations from the norm. Implicit is we can then go back to doing it properly, which strikes me as the definition of a dead end, & a v conservative idea of how culture might work for us.
'Disruption' is driving a quick little forklift - at full-tilt, fully-loaded - through the wall of the opera house.
It dumps new ways of working and making into decades/centuries-old piles of previous ways.
The rubble makes new habitable patterns. You may not know, but you could, if you were looking, trace every shred of shrapnel through its parabola to its source-object.
In the carcasses of bulls there are complex ecologies around the heart.
Plenty of the mutations on show here ought to prove adaptive.
And to determine that a surface is disfigured rather than refigured depends on how you take it, how u fuck.
There may be ruined fences, but there are no ruined stones.
It's interesting to see theatre pose itself as disruptive, because it's usually outside those walls where disruptions occur.
We're most familiar with the Uber, AirBnB, JustEat kind of disruption, from companies which create nothing and intermediate everything.
These kind of enterprises are not game changing, all they do is the same old cultural logic of late capitalism, same old dudes getting rich while making their services progressively shittier. And we're locked into their services: cos switching costs are too high, our friends live here now, we're subscribed to a decade of disruptive socks, they provide our healthcare, security, welfare, and all we can do is grumble as we drive the global elite class forty yards, past retirement age, for two quid an hour which we pay back to outsourcers anyway for our rented false teeth (welcome to the fully automated future the capitalists hav planned -- CHEERS *clink*).
Then there is the disruptive spirit, that looks to break down monopolistic arrangements, to take apart institutions, to actively prefigure and create new realities. The kind that gets lost in the fractional interface between Jobs and Wozniak. Or finds better, more expansive grip in Linus Torvald. The poor kind, the warrior monk kind, the open source kind that spreads and spreads and iterates through cultural lines because it just works.
Carmen Disruption works for me. I'm a Luddite, which means I love technology that returns value to the common good, and despise it used for the diminishment of our lives through private expansion & corporate douchebaggery.
To view CD as a technology is to see it outstripping the older systems.
Nimble, it opens the closed circuits of opera clogged with gilt. It's a cultural algorithim, outputting life&light. The language and bodies shear off the weights we carry in ourselves like dead bull meat. Crucially, and hopefully, it's storing values in variables for the future.
It does a cool job returning opera to our common good.
As we left I tried to take a pic of the bigass bull carcass onstage, but wasn't allowed. Which kinda makes sense
