| 16 July 2010
George Gershwin’s classic Porgy and Bess is finding new life with a French opera company introducing film and dance to create a visual feast.
It has been called the first American folk opera, and it’s as rooted in the Deep South as soul food and Mardi Gras. So for George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess to be staged by – whisper it – a French opera company is a challenge to convention.
Even more of a challenge is that the creative team behind it – directors José Montalvo and Dominique Hervieu – have built their reputation not with musicals or operas, but as choreographers who routinely set their dancers in front of exuberant large-scale video projections. It was their production of On Danse that provided the Edinburgh International Festival with its much-used image of an elephant on a flying carpet in 2007.
Now working with Opéra de Lyon, they are applying their special visual flair to the Gershwins’ 1935 opera, the story of a poor black community in Charleston, South Carolina, where Bess takes up with Porgy, a crippled beggar, only for her former boyfriend, the murderous Crown, to claim her back.
Ira Gershwin based the book on Porgy, a 1927 play by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward, which avoided black stereotypes and offered a frank portrayal of gambling, drinking and drug-taking. What George Gershwin brought to the table was a grounding in the European operatic tradition and a sensitivity to black American rhythms.
“We were attracted to the genius of Gershwin,” says Hervieu. “The music mixes up popular and high-brow culture, the African part and the European part, which was really new for the time and can still be considered innovative today.”
The original production was also the first time an all-black company had been cast in an opera, something that intrigued Hervieu and Montalvo, especially working in today’s Europe where immigration is a political issue. In their video projections, they show images of black American history from the 1930s. “We are Europeans and that brings a distance to this story,” says Hervieu. “There is a universal dimension to the theme of racial segregation, poverty and violence in society, but at the same time, there is a distance compared with the vision of the US, which is very painful. Our distance can provide something new.”
“It’s such a different approach to the production; people will be really intrigued to see it,” says Edinburgh International Festival director Jonathan Mills. “It’s the multicultural energy of the street, set in a coastal, down-at-heel environment that could be Marseille or Barcelona. It’s performed by new migrants to Europe and very much deals with the links between the Creole culture, the Caribbean culture, the Deep South of the United States and Africa itself.”
By introducing film and dance, they are treating opera as it has often been regarded in the past, as the sum of all the artforms. “Opera is the ultimate form of total art,” says Hervieu, who gives each artistic element equal weight and considers the visuals with the same seriousness as the live performance. “We don’t add video to live dance. They are synchronised and created together.”
The purpose of the film element is to introduce a metaphorical dimension that would otherwise be hard to achieve. “It’s the dream part of it,” she says. “The video symbolises what we can’t express on stage with a physical body. We travel, we swim, we go through imaginary worlds,all things we physically can’t do on stage.”
So much for innovation. What is not new is the evergreen quality of songs such as Summertime, It Ain’t Necessarily So and I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’, examples of George Gershwin’s radical ability to fuse classical, jazz and popular styles. The show is now regarded as the first truly indigenous American opera, but on its debut it was panned by critics who were not ready to appreciate the composer’s groundbreaking approach. Only on its revival in 1942 did they give it the acclaim it was due.
“Musically speaking, the score is brilliant,” says Hervieu. “It made me realise that different cultures and imaginations can live together. That’s what Gershwin brought to modern music. It’s also why he’s difficult to classify. He is both jazz and classical, according to the way you see it.”
Porgy and Bess, Edinburgh Festival Theatre, 14-17 (not 15) August, 7.15pm, From £14, Tel: 0131 473 2000
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