Ana Sokolović / Svabda
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Ana Sokolović: Svabda
(European Premiere)
Musical direction: Dairine Ní Mheadhra
Voices: Mireille Lebel, Andrea Ludwig, Pauline Sikirdji, Jennifer Davis, Liesbeth Devos, Florie Valiquette
Directed by: Zack Winokur, Ted Huffman
Svadba (“marriage” in Serbian) is an opera without orchestra, and almost without plot, since an ordinary scene is played out there. Milica, the bride-to-be, crosses the wake and the night alongside her childhood friends: games, songs, bathing, hairdressing, waiting – gestures always before the final separation. The relationship with Les Noces, Stravinsky's "choreographic scenes", is obvious and Ana Sokolović willingly recognizes it. Like Ramuz, author of the Noces libretto for the Russian composer, the composer has assembled texts (songs, nursery rhymes and others) that refer to a popular tradition. But the strictly folkloric character disappears immediately behind the rhythmic and melodic invention that the composer breathes into it, relying on the specific characters of the Serbian language.
Far from observing the rituals she evokes from a distance, Ana Sokolović uses them to make her characters exist. In this, she reinvents the opera, not by telling a story but by bringing out the emotion through the play of voices and bodies put in situation. The effect is immediate: we feel with the characters the emotions of what is no longer just an ordinary moment (a wedding), but the decisive and irrevocable passage from childhood to an unknown world, both hoped for , feared, dreamed of and mocked.
A moment towards the middle of the work gives the measure of the magnificent intricacy of affects and music: the six young girls play, dance, heckle, send jokes, get angry, get tired... It lasts, perhaps too long: the only moment, we say to ourselves, when the work loses its rhythm. Then the music stops – and on stage, Milica, the betrothed, takes a step back, takes herself off the stage and looks at her, as if she wanted to hold back this world in which, however, boredom is beginning to arise. The games then resume, and the songs, all in onomatopoeia, more rhythmic than ever (the spirit of Ligeti is not far away!). As if the music made the public share this short moment of boredom, absence from the world and mixed nostalgia that Milica feels.
At a time when the question of renewing the public of theaters and operas is urgently being asked, and that of the attraction they should be able to exert on young people, Svadba could well provide an element of response: his characters are both immemorial and fully of today. When did we have, at the opera, the impression of seeing on stage, transfigured by the music, teenagers who could be of today? Ana Sokolović succeeds in this, perhaps because she grasps, in all its diversity of uses, the universal power of the voice: that the text is in Serbian in no way prevents the understanding of the work ( even supertitles are not essential).
It must be said that the staging by Ted Huffman and Zack Winokur, sparing in decor, is an example of fluidity that highlights all the symbolic force of the music. In this opera where everything is whirling, they know how to create these slight shifts which make the character of the characters perceptible. Standing on a chair, Milica is already “taller” than her friends around her – and her singing (that of the dazzling freshness of the soprano Florie Valiquette) then leaves the tone of nursery rhymes for a more lyrical expression.
This production, a European premiere of the work in stage version, will also have made it possible to discover six young soloists who are exceptional for their scenic and musical commitment to this a cappella opera where they are therefore naked: Florie Valiquette and Liesbeth Devos, former artists of the Festival Academy, as well as Jennifer Davis, Pauline Sikirdji, Andrea Ludwig and Mireille Lebel, remarkably directed by Irish chef Dáirine Ní Mheadhra.