THE TEMPEST

Minimalism and Metaphysics

Ioana Zirra – the România literară, weekly magazine – no 46, November 21st, 2008

The performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest was staged at the Royal Theatre Hall of the Cotroceni Palace, in Bucharest, by Nona Ciobanu (as director) and Iulian Bălţătescu (light design designer).

This on-stage re-reading of The Tempest goes down to the ultimate structural principles of love which stem from the elements’ magic as enabled to manifest freely in the continuum between man, nature and the Godhead. In respect to these, Prospero is both an instance (acting as the deputy of the Demiurgos) and the magus, plus the ideal warrantor of the felicitous performance (or, to put things more directly, he is a  very good actor); and Miranda is the most perfect beneficiary, in the name of human filiations and along the lines of natural kinship, of all the boons made ready for bestowal by the Instance; these boons which are to be granted via the magical performativity and the spiritual certainties of wisdom itself, and which, all, repose in Prospero, invested as their ascertained, safe, experienced treasurer. In effect, in the staging done by these two creative Romanian readers, who act as genuine visionaries in respect to the canonical Shakespearian text, enriched with passages/transliterations from the Biblical Canticle, there are only two actors who recite the text and interpret the show prototype by means of the word, too: Prospero (Alexandru Repan) and Miranda (Ioana Abur). The rest of the show is woven from music, dance, and light-design poetry. They all make their entry on the stage; however, only after the tensioned body of dancer Koffi Kôkô comes to life. He embodies both Ariel and Caliban – spirits made visible in their duality, existing between what dwells on high and what is inherently lowly; on stage, they translate as the duality of flesh and life reaching for the extremes. This is the second, geometrical essentialization of the performance, and it is obtained by collapsing or telescoping in a single being the two personages, one mystically ineffable, the other mundane, terrestrial and heavy. When Ariel is bodied forth, he comes with the face bathed in the light associated with the Kore and Kouros. Or he may have the grace of a Chinese wise man, but with ebony-dark skin, dancing in the transfiguration endowed with domesticity that he has been granted. When he is Caliban, the same black, sinewy body is bathed in a yellowish light like a rusty pewter vessel.

The third essentialization – which enhances the synaesthesia of the show itself – transforms the other three voices of the play into parts enacted by instrument-characters. Of these, the clarinet of musician Kinan Azmeh, one of the players in the band of the Arab Terpsychorae, is the equivalent of Prince Ferdinand. The most gratifying effect of this essentialization – that offers a minimalist transcription of the classical Shakespearian text – is that it gives the floor and it entrusts the word-part to Miranda, within the lovers’ couple. She is the woman in love capable to put into words love’s tidal wave of tumult and infinity. Whether we feel free to interpret in a feminist sense this greater empowering  of the woman with the Logos, or we understand it realistically, the score of love entrusted to the woman is one of the most significantly unorthodox readings of the play (and even, possibly, a reading contrary to the Shakespearean spirit itself, which, after all, created Ophelia also, as the prototype of the victim incapable of articulating into meaning her reactions to life’s turbidness as spelled for the woman in the masculine key ). In this connection, the restrained, introspective interpretation of love’s scenarios by Ioana Abur shines forth through its modernity and elegance, as it expresses the birth of love in observance of Renaissance degree and individualistic self-control while re-enacting the specific movements of feminine sensibility. The fact that Miranda expresses in words what the clarinet’s hoarse voice only begins to say spelling the desire and heavy, sensual intimations and the dissonant but powerful sense of existence which wells forth in the veins of the man who has fallen in love – this fact is the occasion for a very special duet to obtain, a duet which ends up translating music by means of the word and granting to both music and the word a novel kind of integrity and wholeness.

This takes us to the most delicate level at which the essentializations of the show manage to rise, working as artistically-performative sublimations, re-tracing the Shakespearian text so as to position it in a field of transparent correspondences. The synaesthetic staging of The Tempest by Nona Ciobanu, an intensively aesthetic staging, too, touches the highest spiritual horizon which this play opens, since it manages to bring to the fore the aesthetic self-reflexivity and the transcendental didactic of this late Shakespearian text. The show at the Cotroceni Palace touches this ultimate level of interpretation in the play, since it reduces, reveals and also dilutes the entire anecdotal structure of the text, with its numerous coincidences or romance oppositions. It reaches in depth to the minimalist, modern or postmodern, skeleton of Shakespeare’s creation.

Although the show evinces this simplification of the play’s structural anecdotic (working in the tradition of modern lucidity to become emancipated from anecdotal motifs but lighting upon with the romantic, archetypal poetry instead) – it deepens the understanding of what is universally human and, as such, dominates practically any of the last theatrical plays by Shakespeare. All the late romances, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, the Tempest itself, represent true, fundamental and ultimate lessons in virtue, supported by a number of artifices. But although the plots are rather implausible, mixing the sensational with the scandalous, and threatening justice for good, as it would seem, they nevertheless end up mediating between the scandalous and the sensational, more often than not, by a chain of exemplary coincidences, just as farces do, to offer, as a rule, the most felicitous, miraculous solutions. Everything is plentifully offered to the eye, the ear and the five senses, all in all, as it were in this Tempest, with its monumentally ritual pace, which makes things happen in two rhythms and two worlds at once. The play first opens us to the light of an intelligence which, with Prospero, is in permanent communication and communion with the divinity, standing as an Instance above all the dire confrontations, frame-ups and mere play staged by the worldly, natural or para-natural, i.e., magical forces. But secondly, the magic wielded by the arts of representation re-articulates into a whole the conglomerate of instincts, sentiments, intuitions, obsessions, fear and revolts dominating the scene subliminally. While watching, on the one hand, the two species of dance, the one that Ariel deploys: expressive, allegorical, hieratic and the Calibanesque cadences: threateningly instinctual and erotic, and on the other hand, while witnessing Miranda’s speech, automatically dictated, as it seems, from the entrails of life, when she talks like the sister and bride in the Canticle, or when she gives her ear to the clarinet’s ululations and cadences intimating love to her, the spectators participate to a subliminal emotiveness themselves. They assist to the emotional discharges and oscillations of state they witness as happening in a Miranda who is first seen moved with pity, then shaken by the thrills of her first erotic love intimations. But the audience is equally partaking of the rational power flow put in circulation by Prospero’s wisdom and many skills, replicating the fact that Miranda is not only subjected, but also cooperating with Prospero, who is directing her free will to become elevated by Prospero’s word. This is what makes all the more impressive the process we witness of innocence itself trued and made wise in this staging which brings to the fore the feminine perception of the world. Prospero’s power is projected in love upon Miranda, the ideal apprentice indentured to a wise father who, in this way, ministers to love and justice, although he also has a servant ministering to himself through the bond of witchcraft, but awaiting, like Prospero, the appeasing of evil as existing in the world, to attain liberty; just as in the analogy which the stage representation encourages us to make between Ariel divesting himself of Caliban, to part for good with him.

But on reflecting deeper about the symbolic signs and semiotic factors deployed by this show, we discover a subversive paradigm which would sublate the Instance or oikumenically omnipotent Institution bodied forth by Prospero’s person in the economy of the show. Under his robe, so subtly conceived in two basic hues, or colours, the human, all too human Prospero is wearing the top of a Pierrot costume, like a freshly re-drawn Harlequin. The art of the actor Alexandru Repan restitutes to music and to a spiritual kind of grace the words of his recitation, the recitation of a very experienced actor. His words have a grace akin to the meditative sound of the oud which the Syrian musician Essam Rafea plays.

Through the play’s partings, departures, familiar defamiliarizations posited and exposed, through the minimalism and essentialization of the semes which the director Nona Ciobanu handles and Iulian Bălţătescu, the light-designer artist and scenographer, offers and manhandles the audience with, the semiotics of this performance makes the arts’ own symbiosis be felt keenly in the sons et lumières deployed. And the transcendence sought so insistently in Shakespeare’s late romances come scott free, and cleaned of the useless weight of the fabulation which is not seeking the plausible. We have seen maybe one of the most skilfully modern and aesthetically contemporary representations, in the spirit of Shakespeare’s later created drama, of a play which stages mystery itself. At the origin, or, as Wordsworth and Frye would call it, in the initiative, of this original performance of  The Tempest lies and thrives a visionary inspiration, with its impeccable handling of the staging techniques and intertextual dialoguing, of collages which create fearless shortcuts and courageously strip the text of its fiction, by a magic which makes practically any text capable of parting with the too demure logic of the tradition – while never chipping, however, even an inch of the canonical connotations it bears, but, moreover, enriching them by the translation.

The last Tempest was a tempest of our senses, which vibrated while plugged in directly to Shakespeare, as in an unutterably wonderful kind of chat. We stayed seated, an audience definitively enchanted, stupefied into better living the vein of life, ah, how beautifully! beautiful while secreted in the dark, on the wonder-edge of the stage; and it ticked with its percussion in our direction, like a big heart with such wonderful people(s) in it to pulse each moment’s miracles in our direction. Oh, miracles with people whose fretting selves engender verily the tempest! Oh, love engendered which, in its turn redraws the vein of peace while living! Well, miracles that obtain when relinquishing the pranks of an old artful dodger, the magus. To witness all this, we feel inwardly rejuvenated, mind and all; or, if we have not been in love too, recently, this will at least rejuvenate our anima rationalis. We partake of the continuum reserved for the delights of the spirit: music’s continuum; music, of all arts the queen, doth sway our soul to dance directly. In a denser, more abstract way, we can say that we partake of the light and of the primordial semes of this show, which come all stealing upon us, as light does from the shadow of night at the beginning of the show; and as the comfortable, throne-like seats of the royal theatre hall at Cotroceni come our way, majestically empty when first we step into the silent music auditorium to become seated audience in them. The light of the show starts playing on stage by design, like the deathless germ of the soul, our soul; it moves, in an inexhaustible genesis, to bring forth the pair represented by silence and dance which emerge from the penumbra containing them while lying dormant still, when the show had not started yet.  For we can ponder upon the scenic genesis, entwining the arts and ushering in a special day: the day with man in it, when the word comes into the world, as Logos, to exempt us from all that was heavy in us. And so, here we lie, prostrate, and ready to taste and partake, like some guests un-invited. Or we are, were we not?  Here we were, invited to partake of the time made beautiful in us; ready to curl in ourselves, in the eye that our ear hosted while listening to the moon. In the wake of the speech uttered by Miranda, prompted as it was by the safe, measured spirit inherited by her from Prospero, this process of entering ever more firmly into the space of liberty and maturity, to become worthier and worthier of praise, turns into an occasion to see with our own eyes how the tempests of the senses can be purged. So we were empowered to contemplate the general process by which man has been brought home to himself; on the eve when, coming of age, woman meets man and the clarinet finds “meet” words for his music. And behold how the magus has parted the tempestuous waters to open a way for healing the past.

Oh, how big the atonement! Oh how mature the look that we can cast, as if to look the tempest in the face, encompassing the lake of fire where the human subliminal hubris revolves; from it did the two Romanian artists (the director and the light designer) conjure up and raise to life a spirit that shows in its movement the Calibanized Ariel. In this production, the taint on Ariel’s skin, here we are! was only provisional; for darkness and death contained the spirit to it entrusted only apparently in the fictional texture of their invisibility. Will the spirit emerge free, healed from the unseen wings of the dark stage?

It was against this background that we were able to see the Embrio and the Steam emerging in full view; they were coming to demonstrate by the show’s own concitations, both the beginning and the ending of the world, while placing the performance, this performance perforce in the middle.

A Shakespeare in Only Few Words *****

Magdalena Boiangiu – The Literary and Artistic Adevărul – October 2008

A version produced by Nona Ciobanu after Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and with a cast that will take one’s breath, was staged in the Royal Theatre Hall of the Cotroceni Palace.

In Nona Ciobanu’s show, Prospero, the magician (Alexandru Repan) acts lithely on the lines which separate the distance narrated from the intense living of the present moment; this actor’s station is something that imposes itself under no matter what circumstances, but here he is making utmost use of his power of granting nobility to words by his thought. An overriding scenic presence, which is anything but aggressive, so rare on our scenes today.

On the island where he has been banished, he has constructed his own complete reflexive space, where both good and evil are to be found alike. In the production, the actual characters are bodied forth via the incidence of the light cutting patterns from the spaces of darkness – and the effect upon the audience is extraordinary: from now on, everything happening is plausible and charming. And here is what follows: the tempest which the magus has staged brings to his island the son of the man responsible for Prospero’s banning.

Prospero explains to his daughter Miranda their common past. Helped by Ariel and Caliban, spirits of good and evil, respectively, but here bound within the same bodily frame of being, Prospero directs all that is happening along the lines intended by him. The dancer, Koffi Kôkô, who comes from Benin, but lives in France, being one of the most appreciated choreographers and dancers in Europe is both Ariel and Caliban; as such he/they participate to the dialogue with Prospero by means of the dance.

The mastery of the actor and dancer, the intensity, expressiveness and concentration of the interpreter, the inspired choreography – all give cursiveness to the subject, making the evolutions intelligible and projecting as almost concrete the poetic subtext of the play. The director wanted to show us how good and evil can coexist in the same character, how a decision gets entrenched and how choices obtain. Koffi Kôkô has wings when he is Ariel, but makes cutting, twisted movements when he is Caliban. The passage from the one to the other is smooth, and the dancer suggests the polarities and resemblances in a way that places him at the height of the good actors of Shakespeare’s texts.

Modernity without Shocks

Brought onto the island by the tempest, Ferdinand is interpreted by Kinan Azmeh (a Syrian), playing the clarinet. With musical harmonies, he answers to the verbal ardour of Miranda (Ioana Abur) and again the uncanny is thereby normally integrated in the syntax of the performance. The actors perform on an empty scene, in a universe where the spectator is free to imagine things as he likes it, being dressed in costumes by Doina Levintza and accompanied by the Syrians musicians Essam Rafea (oud) and Omar Al Musfi (percussion), whilst their actions are boosted by Iulian Băltăţescu’s light design. Nona Ciobanu extracts from Shakespeare’s play a single plot-thread, which constitutes a courageous choice when using the original title. This kind of production already inscribes itself in modernity, without seeking any shocking effects, but cultivating in-depth thinking and highly expressive interpretation. Today’s technological means are used to express what Shakespeare himself called the labours - of spirited tensions felt today alike to how they were felt the day before and in fact always the same

Tempest Dancing

Eugenia Anca Rotescu – Scena.ro, the Theatre Magazine, January 2009

What the literary critic Caroline Spurgeon wrote about William Shakespeare’s late masterpiece was that “it is a perfect symphony of sound, and through the sound are represented the contrasts and movement from the strident dissonances of the beginning and as far as the serene harmony of the end”. Director Nona Ciobanu shares these convictions and produces a show in which word, music and dance play equal parts.

The scenic adaptation works in two directions. On the one hand, it sets to music whole scenes in the play, translating them into musical notes and/or choreographic phrasing. On the other hand, it adds, or replaces rather some of Shakespeare’s cues, adding lines from the Canticle. There results a drastically reduction in the number of characters and a limitation of the story’s threads, restricted to the main plot. This leads to a kind of essentialization which puts in evidence the major themes of the text, but leaving untouched its romance atmosphere and its magic.

This essentialization gets entrenched from the very beginning by the odd sonorities, remote yet so familiar, that the music live interpreted by two spirits of the island (Essam Rafea and Omar El Musfi) puts on stage. This essentialization is communicated also by the light contour which gives material existence to the aerial spirit (light design: Iulian Bălţătescu). And when Ariel detaches himself from the power of the ray which has made him visible, in his wake remains the image of a foetus. Thus is born a world constituted exclusively of its defining elements – nature, divinity and man.

But embodiment also hides the duality spirit – flesh. In their exemplariness, they are Ariel and Caliban, one is hieratic, ineffable, the other pertains to the earth, an offshoot of archaic bestiaries. This is why in Nona Ciobanu’s staging they are one and the same creature, extremes of a single being, mutually-repellent contraries, irreconcilable contrasts. Koffi Kôkô, the French choreographer from Benin grants them scenic life in turn. Ariel is waft and swaying, simple illusion and volatile shadow. His concreteness is never consummate. The attraction forces cannot keep him down against the ground. His connection to the soil is brief. It is pure gracefulness and harmony. The movements flow from each other until the sense obtains at a trans-verbal level, in the expressiveness of the body placed in the dancing posture. He describes the tempest, for example, by opening his arms very wide and allowing his body to be twisted by the breakers evoked, which blow up the white blouse unfurling (designed by Doina Levintza), while his steps seem carried along by the strong wind. The passage from Ariel to Caliban is smooth – effected by a discreet sign which slips the blouse from the body and leaves the trunk naked. The relationship with the music is changing now. It is disturbing and restive to the waking mind, it threatens and terrifies. And in fact everything is utterly transformed. The muscles, only supported by instincts, get contracted; the back crouches under the impact of lewd desire, the legs come apart, seeking only the interior balance; the arms beat the air in an agony of hatred and disdain; the eyes are watching.

Prospero (Alexandru Repan) is the only one to have a sustained dialogue with the bipolar creature, with his gestures, his élans and his prejudices. When they are in disagreement, the air between them changes its density, becoming charged with seething forces. But when they come to an understanding, their eyes light up, Prospero repeats Ariel’s stories, and his hands caress him though without really touching him. Their parting, which takes place in almost complete silence, is in itself almost a poem – an infinitely delicate poem about bonds that break without allowing the memories about the past and the future, about a road travelled together, and about the perspective of absolute liberty to vanish. The two artists do not need words to express the complexity of such states. Their fluid looks, the tender inclination they give to their bodies, the budding nostalgic smiles are just enough to do the talking on their behalf.

In addition, with the power of his magic, in a sure and impeccably skilled way, Prospero holds in his care the husbandry of the entire island. Each gesture or word, each attitude or expression, each state of mind or mode of relating to each other bears the mark of the superior prerogative that Prospero has over the seen and the unseen. Everything is subjected to him, incapable and unwilling to resist: whether this applies to his severe watching over Caliban or to the discreet guidance of the two young people towards love, or, again, to his conjuring furies or orchestrating miracles which serve for the just understanding of what is fair. When he, for example, summons the feminine deities to give their benediction to the union of the two lovers, he seems to be directing via an invisible energy the chords of the oud or the percussion; he is the wave enabling the genesis of lights, and video signs, making all of these, as it were, vehicles for the signals from the senses and for wisdom.

The perfect harmony of the actants and musicians, of lights and sonorities, carries along with it spells; mere spells, but also a sense of further miracles. It is in this atmosphere that Miranda blooms. Serene and suave, Ioana Abur evolves from, first, the demure timidity she shows towards her father, obeying him, next, to the fear and clumsiness she shows every time she needs to get around Caliban who was going to violate her honour, but she eventually opens up to love completely. She listens to the notes of the clarinet through which Ferdinand (Kinan Azmeh) is blowing forth the notes of love in her hearing. She translates them in enchanting, fascinating words that seduce, distract and persuade us.

It is from their splendour and from the refined equilibrium of sounds, colours and presences that a “brave new world” is perfected, with Shakespeare’s – Prospero’s signature to tuck it in for us; and destine it not only for the scenic reality, but also beyond it. To paraphrase the Great Will again, it is just to say that the performance prepared by Nona Ciobanu and her company bears likeness to the stuff that man’s perennial dreams and ideals are made of.

September in Bucharest

Carmen Firan – the Scrisul românesc, no 10, October 2008

The Tempest is a show which places side by side in a bold, original manner not just the theatrical art, poetry and music but also dance; and also, Alexandru Repan (a Prospero who shares his senior wisdom in a self-assured way, who wields the power of magic and has codes wherein to suggest the harmony after the tempest, in despite of the contradictions that exist in a distracted world); and also, Ioana Abur (a naive Miranda, whose governing sign is air, and who braves the emotional tempests bearing herself so full of grace), side by side with Koffi Kôkô, an exceptional dancer of European renown (and Ariel and Caliban, moving with virtuoso power in the costume designed by Doina Levintza, to become from a spirit of evil, a saving spirit, wielding a bodily expressiveness in movement and a consistency of the gesture that unify parallel worlds into a universe), side by side, also, with the Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh (Ferdinand, in the Shakespearian play, underwriting words in bold type with music, in Nona Ciobanu’s directing conception – and also sustaining a provocative dialogue with Prospero, inspired by the union of sign and signification), with, by his side also, the other players of Syrian origin, Essam Rafea and Omar Al Musfi, spirits of the Island who complete the idea of harmony, a harmony obtaining beyond the languages, ethnic features or religions.

A serene representation, done in poetic purity, refreshing through the multicultural and artistic equilibrium that it conveys, while contradicting all lamentation of the world’s distracting, aimless agitation, and all forms of lazy renunciation to sense and things out of boredom.

Music, Dance, Poesy in Nona Ciobanu’s Tempest

Nicolae Prelipceanu - the theatrical magazine Teatrul azi, no 11 – 12, 2008

Staged in the space of the royal Palace of Cotroceni, the bijoux created by Nona Ciobanu as an adaptation of The Tempest by Shakespeare is a drastic reduction of the great play by Shakespeare, retaining from the original just the beginning and the story of the two young people, Miranda and Ferdinand, who are falling in love. Equally original is the reduction of some characters to other systems of expression than that of the logos: Ariel and Caliban are played by one of the most famous dancers in the world, Koffi Kôkô, the Parisian from Benin (a dancer consummate in his art, with an imagination and a flexibility, not only of the body, completely out of the ordinary; in a moment he can switch from being the wild Caliban who repells us, to being the seraph-like and daimonic Ariel. His change, though marked for the public by the baring of his torso, seems to bring on stage another character, completely other, stunningly different, yet alike); Ferdinand is the virtuoso Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, also an artist featuring as an outstanding international figure; and the “two spirits of the island” are interpreted by the virtuoso musicians Essam Rafea (oud) and Omar Al Musfi (percussion), both Syrians, members, together with the above-mentioned clarinetist, of the Hewar quartet. It has been a pacifying joy to see and hear these great musicians, together with two Romanian actors and a dancer/choreographer from Benin, but living in Paris, to see them acting in a European play seemingly pertaining to the effete past, all collaborating and sustaining a dialogue with each other, every one of them in their own manner, but keeping in harmony, together, kept so by the hand of the director. The idea of the whole show is brought home to us more poignantly by Iulian Bălţătescu’s light-design, presenting now one actor, now another in a fascinating way; thus is it when Ariel/Caliban first appear on stage as the darkness held inside a contour of light, like a detachable aura. Thus is it also with the show’s conception becoming more entrenched thanks to the sober but vaporous costumes designed by Doina Levintza. Finally, the show draws upon the actors for its lyrical accents, since the poetry of the show is contained and controlled via the sure hand of the director working together with, upon and through her actors.

Nona Ciobanu has achieved her aim in creating this performance: "I was interested in The Tempest as an occasion to reach the space after-the-tempest, a space in which a world of contrasts and contradictions is organically constructed, in harmony with the self; this happens thanks to a miracle we may not be able to invent if we need it; therefore magic is a pretext that can set worlds the road to discovery, myriad discoveries, provided one were courageous enough to give up the paths of power".

This recommends a show whose intense poetry and beauty leaves you steeped in dreams.