Pharaohs and Sirens.

{Femme aux longs cheveux, Man Ray, 1929}


{Mother of pearl lorgnette opera glasses by Austrian optician Otto Schleiffelder with a magnification x5.}
 
Won over, converted, altered, and changed. A trip twice to the opera in recent weeks has led me to rethink the art form I knew and know so little about and I find myself sufficiently wooed, enticed, and on lookout for more. Eye-filling spectacle, skill, and tales familiar served as ample encouragement. Ceremony and costume happily aiding and abetting the transition, fostering along the way a new found appreciation for binoculars, those curious seeing devices that augment action and amplify beauty on stage. The grandeur! The polish! Just like Galileo (1564–1642) searching the magnificent magnified heavens (with the telescope that enabled a magnification of x30), I have watched the brilliance of a large production unfurl before my eyes. I have felt as though the only person in the theatre as I hold them up to my eyes. Looking at a performance, in part, through a pair of binoculars more likely found in a twitcher’s nest, I have felt as though I am viewing it as if through a stereoscope. The scene appears larger and in detail, and, more importantly, all mine. Such is the curious ownership a view through opera glasses imparts. Balanced in my hands, I have ancient Egypt. I can see the faces of the deliciously fake big cat pelts that drape the shoulders. It feels much like holding something precious, secret, my own select view. Is this the thrill of a lighting technician holding a performer in a ball of light, spot lit on the stage, supporting them in the perfect moving blob of white illumination? I press my eyes up close to the little rubber frames that support the lenses and I see stage makeup and fabric crease and shimmer. I see a fragment in this peep show. Something highlighted which otherwise would not have been. Yes, I’ve been swayed by their brilliance. They illuminated both Partenope’s suited suitors and Ethiopian slave garb in equal portion. When the optical aid yields treasure, I don’t care if I look pretentious in the dark. From Aida’s sets that toy with creating the all-important optical illusion of depth to the shadow play and smooth lines of the tickle that is Handel’s Partenope doused in Surrealist dream logic, I have been very lucky to have seen both productions this season. Graeme Murphy’s direction of Verdi’s Aida reminded me of silent and early film cinematic epic staging that can make a cast of many seem like hundreds, and the desire to make like an Egyptian frieze on the conveyor belt when next I am at the airport to pick up family will be hard to resist. It read like a painting beautifully orchestrated. The Nile an abstract band of blue. From Aida I took away with me in my pocket the sense that no detail is too small. From Partenope, a sense that the first idea that manifests is oft the one to chase. Drawing upon the influences of Man Ray, Breton, Max Ernst, and Dali, “...desire, [is] the sole motivating principle of the world, the only master that humans recognise. (André Breton). Seduction, that is what both were to me.


{From the growing Foyer Suite, Mum and me in anticipation of Aida (in April).}


{And in May, in giddy anticipation of Partenope, with Louise too.}


{Theda Bara as Cleopatra, 1917}


{Stereoscope illustration, 1895 (Edinburgh Photographic Society)}
 
+ Opera glasses and Jealousy glasses (The College of Optometrists, London)