With 28,000 LEDs, It’s Lights! Lights! Lights! Action!
By MICHAEL COOPER NOV. 30, 2016
Strung across the Metropolitan Opera’s stage on more than two dozen parallel strands, from the pit to the back wall, 28,000 colorful LEDs will create an ever-changing, sometimes tempestuous sea for the Met’s new production of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin,” which opens on Thursday.
The lights are the centerpiece of the staging by Robert Lepage, who runs the production company Ex Machina and has directed theater, films, circuses and the Met’s much-debated production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. LEDs solve the problem of how to depict water onstage in an opera about the idealized love of a troubadour and a countess separated by the sea, and they provide a visual complement to Ms. Saariaho’s music, which is shimmering, colorful and luminous.
On the morning of the final dress rehearsal this week, Mr. Lepage discussed the production, his attempts to create hypnotic works of theater, and the lessons of his ambitious “Ring,” whose 90,000-pound set of rotating planks did not always work. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
What is it about this piece that made you think of this approach?
It’s so much about water, and so much about the sea, and how the mood of the sea is musically, intimately connected to the different moods of the piece, the different moods of the protagonists. So the sea plays a very, very important part in this — it’s like a fourth character.
But when you take it literally and say, “I’ll put water onstage,” water is like doing a show with young children and animals and insects. It will do what it wants, and you don’t have any control over it. It’s such a poetic piece, and it’s so bewitching and hypnotic musically. It’s important that whatever we decide, the sea has to have that quality. And this line thing — it kind of struck us that that is what medieval music was about. It was about early string instruments, lutes and ouds. There was an idea of this troubadour plucking these strands and creating music.
How many lights do you use?
I think the last count was like 28,000 LED lights, which sounds like a lot, but actually is very minimal if you want to send any kind of video image. People are used, today, to high-definition television. But this was the point: to try to make something impressionistic. It’s interesting — it’s like these scripts where they take all the vowels out and you can still read it, you can read the text. People have a good sense of what shimmering is, and water reflections are.
It is an interesting choice, particularly after the projections you used in the “Ring,” which had an HD, three-dimensional quality, to go for this simpler, almost pointillist effect. What appealed to you about that?
The quality of water, the quality of the sea — if you were going to be sitting for hours looking at the sea, it’s going to have a meditative quality. Like watching a campfire. A show is good when there is a meeting of time and space, when time and space become irrelevant.
Is it right that you were approached about directing the premiere of the piece, at the Salzburg Festival, which ended up being staged by Peter Sellars?
It was in 1999, for the year 2000, and those were very busy years for me, so I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t do it.” But of course I became very jealous of Peter Sellars a few years later when I actually got to see the production on DVD, and I got to hear the music, and I thought, “My God, I’ve just passed up this extraordinary collaboration!”
Kaija and I hope to be collaborating on future projects. She’s a composer of the north — it’s interesting, the culture of the north, it doesn’t sound like an obvious thing, but Canadians, and certainly Canadians who live up north, have a lot in common with Scandinavians and people from the northern part of Japan, the northern part of China. There is a culture of the north, something about our relationship with time, with light, with landscape.
What lessons did you learn from the “Ring,” with the big machine that sometimes worked but sometimes didn’t? The production is coming back in a few years.
Yes. And maybe technology will have caught up with the project, which is also the problem with a lot of our productions at Ex Machina. We have these ideas, we want to do these things, and certain machines don’t exist to support our ideas. But we do it anyway. And eventually, six, seven, eight years later, productions are restaged or on tour again and suddenly technology has caught up and it makes things easier, lighter, less noisy, and eventually things come to fruition.
I’m not trying to excuse any of the bad judgments that we had on certain elements of the “Ring,” but you know, when [Sergei] Eisenstein did his first movies, people would actually hide behind their seats because they thought the train was actually coming, and they couldn’t stand the early language of editing. So I’m not saying that our production was as revolutionary as Eisenstein’s film, but what I’m saying is that people get used to certain things, they accept them as part of the vocabulary after a few years. People are like, “Oh, the techy guys are invading opera!” And then the next year, everybody’s doing it, not because we did it, but because it’s part of the vocabulary now. It all depends on how you use it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/arts/ ... front&_r=0