After De Profundis
In 1895 Oscar Wilde went into prison as Oscar Wilde, the darling of champagneand-chandelier society after writing plays like The Importance of Being Earnest. Two years later, he emerged as Oscar Wilde, transfigured writer of the 50 000-word love letter which became known as De Profundis.
A century later, American composer Frederic Rzewski sliced into Wilde’s text and set extracts of it to music that both portrays and disturbs Wilde’s descent into purgatory. To piano both lyrical and discordant, Rzewski added shouts, groans, whistling, heaving, breathing and yelling – all scored with exacting precision for the pianist to perform while striking chords with her closed fist or crouching over the tinny end of the keyboard playing a phrase with obsessive repetition.
Then, last year, two international artists now working in Grahamstown began collaborating to make this layered and demanding work their own. Last week, they presented this work to audiences who found themselves transported by one woman and her piano. In 40 intense minutes, pianist Joanna Wicherek and choreographer Athina Vahla invited us towards our own understandings of suffering borne of confinement.
Using Wilde’s plunging lamentation and Rzewski’s fiendishly complex soundscape, Vahla directed Wicherek’s every muscle in every moment.
The result was unexpected – for the audience (who had likely never encountered such a cerebrally demanding performance which nevertheless packs an emotional punch) as well as for the pianist (who on Saturday contended with a dog barking nearby, a spasm of front row coughing and some back row chair-dragging).
Wilde’s De Profundis is a work of its time, its relatively archaic use of language endowing it with cadence and rhythm a little unfamiliar to the contemporary ear.
Rzewski’s hybridised offspring, also called De Profundis, escalates the demands this work makes on an audience. Wicherek’s and Vahla’s collaboration, resulting in a provoking mashup of performance genres, helps us all: Wilde’s redemptive journey finds new life, Rzewski’s littleknown work grows wings, and the audience approaches fresh insight into the human condition.
They have called their work De Profundis: Prolongations of Silence and it is this silence which speaks loudest. However, as with any artwork, success in hitting home depends on a mass of opportunities that may easily be missed.
How to strike a viewer’s heart so that it is forever altered? Both artist and audience have to be present and near-naked. Judging from comments in the audience discussion on Saturday following the final performance, this happened.
The person next to me was close to weeping. That he could be so pierced points to two simultaneous circumstances: he had come prepared to “calculate the orbit of his own soul” and Wicherek’s refined control of her medium provided the austerity of emotion that sent Wilde’s arrow home.
But it is just as possible to leave with only the intellect provoked. This, too, emerged post-performance.
Art relies on an intersection of moments that cannot be choreographed. Art only begins, said Wilde, where imitation ends.