Film: She, so beloved

October 2007 to January 2008

Simon Keenlyside
Zenaida Yanowsky
The Brothers Quay (directors)

A film to mark Orfeo’s 400th anniversary. A new work by film-makers The Brothers Quay that combines film, music and contemporary dance. She, so beloved is choreographed by Kim Brandstrup and features singer Simon Keenlyside and dancer Zenaida Yanowsky.

The piece is co-commissioned with Capture and presented in association with The Culture Company and Leeds City Art Gallery

A groundbreaking collaboration between avant-garde film artists The Brothers Quay, contemporary dance choreographer Kim Brandstrup, Royal Ballet principal Zenaida Yanowsky and acclaimed opera singer Simon Keenlyside.
In 1607 the artforms of music, dance and visual art came together as OPERA. What happens when leading figures from these art forms work together today?

She So Beloved… is a contemporary artwork for today’s society. Technologically sophisticated in execution, the work explores dark psychological territory and dangerous encounters between the living and the dead.

What the critics say

A review by Lucy Turner for SK.info, 24 October 2007

She So Beloved is an L’Orfeo anniversary project produced by Opera North in conjunction with the Leeds City Art Gallery.   It is a two-part “installation” in a separate, totally blackened room at the Gallery – so black that at first I paused from taking any further steps at the entrance, as I could see nothing at all.   The black-and-white film, which started when I entered, represents Hades as a sort of huge grimy Dickensian space, with smoke whirling around, into which Simon (as Orpheus) looks down from a railing very high up while you can hear his voice singing “Possente spirto” from the Monteverdi L’Orfeo – occasionally distorted with a bit of echo effect.   Zenaida (as Eurydice) becomes visible a long way below, lying under a black veil;   at first, she seems to respond semi-consciously to the sound of Simon’s voice;   then you see her face, and the eyes are so utterly lifeless that you realise she is already nearly “gone”, and certainly has no remaining self-will;   and then you become aware of Hermes sitting alongside and controlling her, and even dancing with her.

Eventually Simon finds his way down to her;   her back is turned to him;   he doesn’t rush and embrace her (nothing so obvious!), but approaches her slowly and very gently nudges her arm with his face (this was the real lump-in-throat moment);   she turns partly towards him, raises her hand to touch him, then subsides under the dark veil again, unable to respond to him further.   Orpheus has failed to rescue Eurydice.   It is a powerful piece, magically produced and performed;   they are both terrific artists, but I cannot forget the sheer lifelessness in Zenaida’s eyes in particular.

There was also a small enclosed box on a stand nearby, in which the scene of the film was presented.   From the front it was a straight view, but through the various viewing holes at the side and rear, with different levels of magnification, one saw quite different pictures – highly ingenious.

I am not aware that it is intended to have any life beyond Leeds at the end of December.   So anyone who wants to see this will have to go to Leeds in the next two months!

See www.operanorth.co.uk and click on Projects.

Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph, 6 October 2007

She, so Beloved: A magical vision of hell

Rupert Christiansen on a new installation inspired by L’Orfeo

Of all the many celebrations marking the 400th anniversary of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo – in many respects, the first true opera – none can be more hauntingly beautiful or arrestingly original than She, so Beloved, an installation that can be seen in Leeds Arts Gallery this month.

It is the latest in a series of projects commissioned and produced by Opera North’s Dominic Gray which takes the company’s brief beyond conventional staged performance, linking opera with other art forms and intellectual disciplines.

Inspired by Rilke’s poem Orpheus.Euridice.Hermes – from which the title is taken (“Diese So-Geliebte”) – and its suggestion that Eurydice may not have wished to be led back to the world of the living, it consists of a large viewing box with magnifying portholes, through which can be seen the figure of Eurydice apparently flying through a mysterious landscape of rotting wood and fallen electric pylons.

On the wall alongside the box runs an anamorphic painting which, like Holbein’s The Ambassadors, contains distorted elements that reveal their true significance and proportions only when viewed from a certain angle. On the end wall, an exquisite eight-minute film is projected on to a 16ft x 9ft screen.

To a numinous soundtrack in the course of which he sings “Possente spirto”, the lament from the third act of L’Orfeo, the baritone Simon Keenlyside as Orpheus peers down into the chambers of hell, in which the figure of his wife Eurydice, the wonderful Royal Ballet principal Zenaida Yanowsky, lies veiled in mortuary black, her face pallid and expressionless.

Caressed by Hades (Kenneth Tharp), she dances a limp and deathly pas de deux (choreographed by Kim Brandstrup). Orpheus descends to reclaim her, but when his bid to lead her back to life fails, a series of sublimely strange final images show him shut out and all light extinguished. (Knowing that Keenlyside and Yanowsky are newly married themselves makes the fable all the more poignant and resonant.)

This unique piece of visual sorcery has been created by the Brothers Quay. Identical twins, born in Philadelphia of Manx and Polish extraction, based for the past 40 years in London, Timothy and Stephen Quay are filmmakers and animators working in a tradition of surrealist fantasy.

But they stand apart from the trickery of computer-generated imagery, the cartoon jokiness of Nick Park’s Aardman movies or the grotesque extremes explored by Matthew Barney.

Theirs is a more densely poetic, melancholic Middle European tradition whose best known exponent is Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, and they share his talent for “making the familiar strange” by using everyday objects and images alongside marionettes and mannequins and creating a densely resonant, almost Gothic atmosphere in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Everything they do, they once said, takes place “in the thirteenth month of the year” in “a universe that is totally self-sufficient in its freakiness”. Their meticulous and mysterious craft has been exercised in both short and feature-length films, of which the best known are The Street of Crocodiles and Institute Benjamenta, as well as ads for Coca-Cola, Walkers Crisps, the Drugs Council and Dulux.

Spoken dialogue plays little part in their world: their soundtracks tend to be full of either muttered near-gibberish or music of a Stockhausenish nature. They have also made pop videos and contributed designs to theatre and opera productions directed by Richard Jones.

As a piece devised specifically as an art gallery installation, She, so Beloved represents something of a new departure for the Quays. Originally they had hoped to film in the Victorian arches beneath Leeds train station, where they could have taken visual advantage of an underground river, but when this proved impossible, they came back to Christine Edzard’s Sands Studios, round the corner from their Aladdin’s cave of an atelier in Southwark, south-east London, where they often start work at 3am.

Like everyone else involved in the project, they have done it for “no money”, relying on the help of old friends. Recently, they have found it difficult to get properly funded commissions – what they do is far too imaginatively challenging and barrier-crossing for the small-minded box-ticking apparatchiks at the Arts Council.

But you can’t help feeling that the Brothers Quay are impelled and motivated by dark powers beyond the realm of bank managers and balance sheets, so perhaps an absence of cash is beside the point. What they make is simply magic.

From the Guardian blogsite

“A phantasmal, filmed ballet flickers the opposite wall in which baritone Simon Keenlyside nuzzles his real-life partner, dancer Zenaida Yanowsky, in a scene from the opera choreographed by Kim Brandstrup. The most enigmatic exhibit appears to be some form of cosmic map, or possibly a splurge of ectoplasm, but turns out to be an anamorphic diagram which, when viewed from a certain angle, resolves to form the image of Orpheus’s lute.
The experience isn’t a complete substitute for a decent production of the opera, but it’s a beautifully produced journey to the dark side of the Quay Brothers’ imagination. Brandstrup’s choreography has a spectral grace, with Yanowsky pliably encompassing Rilke’s description of Eurydice as “fluent, sinuous as hair.” And Keenleyside’s [sic] rich, lachrymose baritone is arrestingly unusual in a role more commonly sung by a tenor. If you happen to be in Leeds city centre it’s well worth popping in – it’s the best trip to Hades you’ll make all week.”

Mike Dixon, Ballettanz, Dec 2007 (German ballet magazine)

What a film and installation the Quay Brothers created! Their tribute to Claudio Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” and the 400th anniversary of the opera is currently shown at Leeds City Art Gallery. Royal Ballet Principal Zenaida Yanowsky is starring in “Eurydice: She, So Beloved“

The first space is an infinity of darkness, disorienting and surprising after the well lit galleries that precede it. The first reaction is to stop absolutely still in the stygian void to collect oneself and find some means of orientation. After a few moments faint light is discerned coming from another darkened room and the sound of running feet. One stumbles into a larger space and gradually sees the outline of a large trapezoid box containing a hellish landscape which can be viewed through three apertures, each of which gives a different, distorted perspective. This is the landscape Eurydice inhabits, seen in microcosm. Bleak and rocky, with weird pylons and suspended globes it is a world unto itself, the realm beyond the Styx. This Optical Box draws the eye inwards, as through a microscope, to examine in detail the unimaginable dreariness of the terrain. The strangeness contained within, the odd figures, shapes and suggestions declare: This is not your world viewer; you have no place here.

This is the first part of the film and installation by the Quay Brothers, commissioned by Opera North in association with Leeds City Art Gallery to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Monteverdi’s “Orfeo,” the first great opera to survive in the international repertoire. Although not the first opera on the theme of Orpheus – the subject was already well represented during the Renaissance intermedii – it is probably the best known, apart from Gluck’s later masterpiece, and its first performance in Mantua, with a text by Alessandro Striggio, marked an operatic milestone.

The Optical Box is connected to a screen via a long panel with an anamorphic painting representing Orpheus’ lyre; an image with an ovoid motif, strings and hands, whilst the screen features the singing and powerful presence of the baritone Simon Keenlyside as Orpheus and the haunting beauty of the Royal Ballet principal Zenaida Yanowsky. The role of Eurydice was conceived for the dancer, who has worked with the Quay Brothers before on other pro-jects choreographed by Will Tuckett and one can immediately understand why. Not only is she an artist of physical grace and refinement but also a consummate actress. She utters paragraphs in a languid movement and volumes in a vacant stare. The veteran dancer Kenneth Tharp plays Hermes, the messenger god, with great presence. Keenlyside is a fine singer, renowned for his sexiness on stage and is a good mover. One of his biggest fans is the American choreographer Trisha Brown who has worked with him a number of times.

He and Yanowsky were recently married, which gives added poignancy to their roles in the film. The stylised action of the film, choreographed by Kim Brandstrup, is based on Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes. and reflects his conception that Eurydice has become “…all crammed with death too huge and recent for her understanding …” taken root in her new environment and no longer aware of Orpheus or the messenger of the gods.

The short black and white film has a mystical intensity that compels one to watch it over and over, riveted by the intensity of Yanowsky’s sad beauty, who is oblivious to the presence of the husband who has come to release her from the shackles of Hades. Her slightly mystified expression when he touches her hand is heart-wrenching, conveying that she is lost in her new world and that he is an alien there. The climactic moment when Orpheus turns and looks back to ensure that Eurydice follows is not shown.

There are no dramatic, narrative or stagy effects. Atmosphere is all. Eurydice sleeps beneath a dark veil, she is disturbed, she returns to her eternal slumber beneath the shroud. Brandstrup has come into his own as a choreographer in the last decade. It seems that his work is more refined and pared down with each passing year. His work for his own company, The Royal Ballet and others has shown an ever developing sophistication but here he does everything with suggestion and stillness. Brandstrup’s choreography is minimalist but infinitely telling in every restrained gesture. The use of close-up being employed to magnify each subtle emotion.

The Quay Brothers say: “In conceiving this project we wanted to approach it from two different perspectives: one, where the eye is plunged into the microscope (an Optical Box) and the other eye into the telescope (a film ballet): and unified in space by an anamorphic painting of Orpheus’ Lyre…” It is this tension of perspective which gives the installation its power. The Optical Box represents an immutable reality, the film a timeless infinity.

The installation, within the context of Leeds City Art Gallery, thrives on contrasts. The gallery, housed in a superb example of Corporation Gothic architecture, is part of a set piece which embraces the iconic Town Hall – a massive Corinthian temple topped by a mighty clock tower – and the City Library. As an architectural group they enshrine in Yorkshire stone the enlightened values of the Victorian merchant class.

The paintings within the gallery, largely acquired by wealthy local worthies in the mid Nineteenth century, feature some of the grand academic oils of the age of Empire, familiar to many British schoolchildren. Heavy gold frames, records of military heroism, classical nudes, seascapes and religious subjects wrestle for supremacy through their size and seriousness. Interestingly, one large image stands out: “The Return of Persephone from the Underworld” by Lord Leighton, recording with serene optimism the draped figure of the abducted nymph, borne out of Hades by Hermes and returned to the open arms of her mother, Demeter. Leighton leads us into the light, the Brothers Quay into the dark. The bleaker contemporary vision is a reminder that we live in a more pessimistic world, where death lacks the monumental trappings of a society confident of an after-life, and dying is a taboo subject for social discussion.