Carolina Piola recreates the confinement of 2020 in the performance “I Reduced You to Home.” The piece is a brief existential treatise on the closeness of death or its presence in every moment. It can be visited today at 7 PM at Espacio cheLA as part of the Nueva Ópera Festival program.
The house is open or, more precisely, it exists in a state of totality as if there were no world outside of it. The furniture, worn ancient artifacts with a usage that gives them a noble appearance, as if each item in the scene had a story, crowd together to provide a sense of enclosure.
The scene takes place under the protection of that antique furniture, but that box that resonates and speaks invites us to peek inside. We walk around the house and look through the window to try to understand what is happening. Carolina Piola has successfully recreated in this sound installation called “I Reduced You to Home” a poetic version of the quarantine we lived through in 2020.
But this would be the narrative detail that expands and becomes a brief existential treatise on the closeness of death or its presence inhabiting every moment. This piece, which can be visited today at 7 PM at Espacio cheLA as part of the Nueva Ópera Festival program, also becomes an aesthetic archive of a recent historical fact that the author generated, partly with records from her own family.
This adds a documentary quality to material sustained by fictional procedures where the realistic component merges with the resources of opera, but at the same time, this genre is invaded by more domestic characteristics in a sort of naturalism of stillness.
The configuration of the space with the scenic design by Salvador Aleo and Tomás Cernik, and the art direction by Gonzalo Córdoba, somewhat recalls Lars von Trier’s film “Dogville,” where the artifice of the stage combines with a use of the film studio.
An opera in a warehouse
By staging this opera in a warehouse, with the scenic structure at the center and us as dilettante characters who choose where to stop, from what point of view to observe the situations, and how far to allow ourselves to assume our role as voyeurs, the skeleton of the scene becomes almost an object and not simply a set. We view it from all angles, and in doing so, it transforms into a sound box with an aesthetic close to an installation, an artifact that could be seen in a museum as a durational performance.
The way the performers settle into the scene (under the direction of actors by Paola Traczuk) allows them to play, at times, as inanimate beings. Especially in the case of the girl (Mía López), who wears a white dress and, when we see her still on a chair, gives us the impression of contemplating an old doll. A similar thing happens with Charo Moreno, the actress who abandons herself in an armchair. That stillness composes an idea of death, an indeterminate and agonizing zone.
The notion of a weighed-down time becomes vibrant thanks to the choir (directed by Agustina Crespo, who also handles the musical composition), which uses words like “bleach” or combines sounds with parasites. They all sing while carrying a backpack on their backs as if they are ready to leave at any moment or as if there were no longer differences between the outside and the inside, and customs were altered in their forms.
“I Reduced You to Home” is a project that Carolina Piola developed with the support of the French Institute and the Mozarteum Argentino, and it was finalized during a residency in Paris and at the National Center for Creation in Music (GRAME) in Lyon, where Carolina Piola gathered recordings of sounds, video, photographs, and objects.
A use of spoken voice
There she met Amélie Lambert, who is in charge of the sound design. The notion of new opera not only speaks of the ability to venture into topics that are close, even situational, but also of establishing a sound narrative that proposes a use of spoken voice and ambient noises as part of the dramaturgy.
Many times we heard the text but could not identify who was speaking, and in that dissociation of voice and scene, in the need to move around to find the character that spoke, each of us constructed a different sequence.
If we were near the actress acting as the narrator, Marcela Padvalskis, or the boy Ulises Zuluaga Ransenberg, or Charo Moreno when she recounted that, as an elderly woman, she was accustomed to the succession of identical days (an element that further defines this dismembered family, detached from all harmony, almost living under a state of absence), the words entered directly into correspondence with the scene. However, sometimes we were surprised when we were paying attention to a detail or looking at some of the photos projected, like a sort of entertainment typical of the confinement of rummaging through old photos.
In those moments, the word could be a thought, a sound detached from a body that led us to imagine or incorporate it as part of those miniature objects that attempted to help us endure a life indoors.
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