Anna’s Wake (1992)
3-D opera for tape, live singer and 16mm film
Text, idea, direction: Iris ter Schiphorst and Christine Daum
Duration: 55 min.
Supported by funds from the Senate Department for Cultural Affairs (E-Music Department) and the 1992 Women Artists' Funding Programme
WP: 29.01.1993, Berlin, Ballhaus Naunynstraße16mm film: Christine Daum
Actress and singer on stage and in the film: Anna Clementi
Performance material available from the composer
Text, idea, direction: Iris ter Schiphorst and Christine Daum
16mm film: Christine Daum
ANNO A ... the beginning of psychoanalysis or the end of opera? - in the centre:
ANNA O ... A voice or a woman? In images, sounds or words? A music:
O ANNA ... "O tell me everything about ANNA...! I want to hear everything about ANNA... Oh, you know ANNA...? Yes, yes, of course, we all know ANNA... Tell me everything. Tell me now. You'll be shocked when you hear it."
Synopsis
The playful treatment of the history of opera and the medical history of ANNA O..., the first hysteric supposedly cured by psychoanalysis, has given rise to a multi-media spectacle that swims in the wake of Joyce's exuberant modernism and is at the same time a wake for the stigma of a female illness.
The story is told in three visually and musically differently accentuated parts about the mutability of a woman - ANNA, which entails her various forms of appearance and expression.
ANNA does not allow herself to be pinned down, definitive determinations do not catch up with her. If she has just ironised the gesture of an opera diva by singing Bel Canto, the next moment she can be affected by her own melancholy image. The moods and images change, swinging back and forth like a swing. But ANNA drives her self-presentations through different times at least as much as she seems to be exposed to the changing images and sounds, the media definitions around her.
Reviews
Berliner Tagesspiegel, 15 February 1993, Sandra Luzina
Lädierte Puppe/The Triple-D-Opera "Anna's Wake" at Ballhaus Naunynstraße
In a way, the main discoveries of psychoanalysis are due to the hysterical woman. Freud's patient Anna O. has now become the protagonist of a triple-D opera for film, tape and live singing. In "Anna's Wake", composer Iris ter Schiphorst and filmmaker Christine Daum speculate on the connections between the "end of the opera" and the beginning of psychoanalysis. From a chronological point of view, the completion of opera at the end of the 19th century coincides with the discovery of the unconscious. However, "Anna's Wake" is also conceived as an examination of the female voice, its sound and expressive possibilities and at the same time as a tribute to the Roman singer Anna Clementi.
It begins with a reminiscence of the exaggeration of emotion in singing, literally taking bel canto to the extreme. Placed on a raised platform, with elongated proportions reminiscent of one of Klimt's Art Nouveau heroines, Anna Clementi has to sing against a tangle of electronically distorted voices. The diversity of voices in her head - it can no longer be tamed, captured in a beautiful sound.... In the second part, Anna Clementi drives her voice into the extreme registers of a sparsely orchestrated sound environment. In the third, she discovers the alphabet as sound material; the repetitions of sounds and wordplay add a comically ironic note to the spectacle.
Anna with many faces: at the end, the singer presents herself as a radiant androgyne in a white suit. The singing returns to melodiousness and now resembles an invocation of names. In addition to Anna Livia Plurabelle from Joyce's "Finnegang's Wake", a certain DIANA is also mentioned. Anna is not one, Anna - there are many.
Berliner tip, issue 4/93, Anna-Bianca Krause
SOLO FÜR ANNA/The Triple D'Opera "Anna's Wake" gets by with just one actress
A wheelchair marks the beginning of the stories. From then on, singer and actress Anna Clementi moves along the abyss on all levels. In a ball gown, she hobbles across streets at night, on high heels she walks over broken glass: her flat is a labyrinth of mirrors, memories and alcohol. The 3D opera "Anna's Wake", written by composer and musician Iris ter Schiphorst and filmmaker and author Christine Daum, revolves around the medical history of Berta Pappenheim - better known as the case of Anna O., as the founder of the Jewish Women's Association was called on her psychiatric file. The work has three different levels that constantly overlap. On the one hand, there is the composition, a soundtrack that comes alive with a babble of voices, choral singing, everyday noises and orchestrated parts, which comes from the tape and is both the backbone and the driving force of the whole. On the other hand, the film, which alternates between two different screens, visualises the conditions in which the only character in the opera is walled in. Anna Clementi, the film actress, is also present in the flesh, which is the third level.... The choreography of "Anna's Wake", the interplay between the film character and the live actress, is meticulously crafted: Anna Clementi communicates with her own image, with her own story. If she wears a white dress live, she sits opposite herself on the screen in a green two-piece suit. When she sings, her celluloid mouth often moves, she screams, breathes and reveals her subconscious. Anyone who wants to follow the multimedia path of a hysteric can do so from 12 to 14 February.