Among the most striking aesthetic experiences of my life is a show I saw in 2013, when I was brand new to the business of cultural journalism, a five-hour performance without intermissions called Einstein on the Beach – music by Philip Glass. I had little idea about who was involved; it was directed by Bob Wilson and Lucinda Childs, and I didn’t know either of them. It was a huge revelation for me, as the posters proclaimed: a show of dance and singing, with hallucinatory, burlesque, and dreamlike scenes, melodic loops repeated to the point of trance, a kind of perfect work that combines plastic arts, music, dance, and theater. It was an experience that immersed the audience in a very different aesthetic realm from the one they are used to: beyond narrative, beyond rationale. I emerged from it in a state of ecstasy.
I also had some apprehension about going to see Satyagraha, which is currently playing for the first time at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, and is the second part of a trilogy composed by Philip Glass, with the first being Einstein on the Beach. On paper, it seems quite complicated: a work centered on the figure of Gandhi, the Indian lawyer advocate of nonviolent resistance who was assassinated in 1948, and his major influences: Leo Tolstoy, the Indian thinker Tagore, and the American activist Martin Luther King. To evoke these figures and the philosophical-political movement, Glass and his librettist Constance de Jong in 1980 chose to adapt a text from ancient Indian literature, the Bhagavad-Gita, an epic foundational text of Hinduism written between the 5th and 2nd centuries BC.
Finally, a simple matter to represent on an opera stage – Gandhi, Luther King, Tolstoy, and an abstract Sanskrit text discussing war, peace, and the attitude a man must adopt in the face of violence in the world: it seems unfeasible on paper. However, contrary to image of a complicated and ultra-cerebral setup, the two directors, former dancers, deliver a highly embodied show with a dozen soloists, a dozen dancers, and the formidable choruses of the Opéra de Paris, performing in an open set resembling a dance studio. The scenes are full of emotions depicting the torture of a young man by an enraged militia, a large round reminiscent of collective healing, or a political meeting where dissidents are silenced.
These images of violence and calm evoke contemporary conflicts – it’s not abstract at all, just like the minimalist music of Philip Glass. The looping melodies, seemingly simple like sonic waves ebbing and flowing, are not cold or abstract music, but very lyrical and evocative. In the end, it is a rather simple spectacle, of great beauty, where I rediscovered that trance effect I had experienced so strongly in Einstein on the Beach. It’s at the Opéra Garnier, but the show will also be broadcasted on France Musique on May 23rd.
