The Blue Woman
dir. Katie Mitchell
composer. Laura Bowler
librettist. Laura Lomas
at. The Royal Opera House, London
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SINNER GET READY
by LINGUA IGNOTA
All songs by Kristin Hayter
Production by Kristin Hayter and Seth Manchester
***
“It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind.”
- Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis
In The Blue Woman, the stage is split in two. In the bottom half, eight women; four cellists, and four vocalists. All sit on plain stools under a cold blue light. The top half of the stage is a screen that shows the journey of a woman who wakes in an abandoned building, goes out into the streets of London, walks through the streets, and rides on the train. She is looking for something, looking for someone, trying to piece themselves back together in the aftermath of a rape. The four voices offer poetic explorations of the psyche: are they different women? The same woman? Yes, that’s exactly who they are. As a work, it is an exploration of trauma, and thus, in a way, the exploration of that which cannot be spoken. The words of the libretto circle around the barred nature of the subject and the endless, almost impossible, struggle of knowing oneself. Brought home in an immediate and terrifying way is the violence and grief of not just realizing that you are now fundamentally a different person, but that also you never had any choice in that transformation. The mind returns to its trauma looking for a way of rebuilding, ‘I am dragged back/to a loop of time I cannot escape/It rings itself around me, like a coil, like wire.’ There was a ‘shape of a woman/Who used to be here.’ To put this another way, trauma is a kind of haunting -- The Blue Woman is a ghost story. At one point, the actor on-screen touches the wall of a crumbling apartment, tracing fingers over moldy wallpaper. There’s something under there, something trying to get out. The literary echo here is to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, but whilst that placed female oppression into the tight sphere of domesticity, here it’s the city generally that is the site of haunting. You go out into the night and you take your ghosts with you. Ghost stories or hauntings are frequently less about fear, and more about grief, ‘A ghost in daytime/haunting/her sleepless nights.
Musically, Laura Bowler’s composition matches the shattered and fragmentary nature of the lyrics. The four cellos all but writhe on the stage, being plucked, struck, and bowed both thoughtfully and menacingly. Cellos have always lent themselves well to horror scores, and the atonal shrieks of the quartet mesh beautifully, generating exceptional tension in the opening half of the piece. As one of the vocalists recounts a dream where ‘I’m buying a coffee and inside I am drowning….I put my hands to my chest and it’s swollen and filling up and filling up and I am drowning, here on dry land,’ the music wrings every ounce of tension possible out of the moment. It is the sound of a panic attack, thickened by the texture of playing in a room where a few hundred people watching barely dare take a breath. What helps drive this sense of tension is the way in which both staging and sound refuse to allow the audience to engage with this in a straightforward way -- the musicians are all on stage but there are other sounds that emerge into the mix, percussion cuts through like a goddamn jump-scare, there’s a voice-over that layers and loops and intercuts with electronic manipulation and ambient field recordings that follow the woman as she walks through south London. The noises could be train lines, fire, or even gunshots: violence just on the edge of hearing, suffusing the room with paranoia, with the urge to always be looking over your shoulder. There’s a remarkable coldness to the music, a kind of barely contained fury that forms the auditory counterpoint to the images on the screen, with the woman often shown crammed into a box, punching outwards at invisible barriers in a desperate attempt to get out The electronic and drone elements combined with this intensity makes me wish for Bowler to make an absolutely furious experimental metal album (someone needs to introduce them to Feminazgul IMMEDIATELY).
All of this raises a kind of obvious question: is this an opera? I should confess I’ve never seen opera live before, I’d never been to the Royal Opera House before. On walking in the very first thing I was given was a flyer for a new arrangement of Das Rhinegold, the opening to Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. Opera appears as a jewelry box, a cultural form suspended in amber, maintained through its apparent cultural capital and obscene amounts of wealth, so is this an opera? Watching and listening I couldn’t help but feel the friction between content and form -- the fury and rage so coldly and beautifully unfurled were not just directed at the seemingly endless cycle of male sexual violence but at the idea of opera itself. Opera, with all of its musical traditionalism and conservatism, where the role of women has all-too-often been to die publicly and horribly for the good of some contrived plot. In contrast, The Blue Woman strikes me as opera as a weapon: opera-against-opera itself. Is this opera? Perhaps not, but it is a sign of what opera could become (or is already becoming). Perhaps I’m reaching a little, but the piece itself makes explicit reference to this kind of systemic critique. The whole horror here is not that this is one woman’s story but it is every woman’s story. As one of the singers puts it:
Hands on her throat…telling her she likes it…I see a woman in an office toilet who wipes her face and tries a smile…I see Cars and buildings and bedrooms and parks I see the tanks roll in, the soldiers’ faces, the village on fire, scorched earth red rivers I hear swallowed silences A thousand women The marks on their bodies.
As the words are heard, the camera following the woman on screen pans out to take in the city of London and lingers for a moment on the skyscrapers which are home to some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions, connecting the sexual violence of patriarchy to capitalism. The lyrics draw a direct link between violence on the individual level and the violence of war. Thus, here the genealogical link is less to Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (which was itself turned into an opera from which The Blue Woman naturally takes some influence) and more to Kane’s first play, Blasted wherein interpersonal sexual violence is explicitly connected to war when a bomb literally tears through a hotel room. Some reviews for The Blue Woman claimed the piece is too fragmentary to be ultimately artistically satisfying, which speaks both to the narrowness of much contemporary arts criticism and a fundamental misreading of the piece itself. Why would things resolve, and more importantly why should they? The very nature of trauma is in the fact that this doesn’t make sense, that this is inescapably fracturing. To offer some kind of coherence is not just a crushing cliche of the worst kind but a fundamental betrayal of the work which forces the audience to both introspect about their own traumas and even confront their own complicity in the systems of violence on which society runs. This is Brechtian opera, designed to be not just a performance but an active process, a self-taken apart and shown to the audience. A work like this, I think, reveals not just a great deal about all those who decided to create it, but those who watch it too.
Yet, despite its coldness, the righteous fury when it comes to its ending it is, albeit in a downbeat way, hopeful. The woman is taken back to the beginning at the very end of the piece, to the moment in which all of us are torn from the unity of the world into being a subject -- our birth. Every ending is a beginning and after the almost whispered lyrics about burning the world down, the final line speaks of a kind of unitary, almost mystical wholeness. I think much of this comes back to the idea and symbolism of the color Blue -- which is the key color theme in the film projected, and the environment in which the singers and cellists are sat. Blue as color has been associated historically with both depression and hysteria but with the sublime too, even with God. Derek Jarman, whose magnum opus Blue was made as he was dying of HIV, which had taken his sight, wrote that “blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits” and if there is hope in The Blue Woman it is in this idea that a self is never a self alone, that out of the blue we can be shattered and remade in the most beautiful and painful of ways.
It’s the tension between form and content that comes to mind when listening to and watching The Blue Woman alongside LINGUA IGNOTA’s genuinely astonishing album SINNER GET READY. The stage name and persona of American multi-instrumentalist, musician, and singer Kristin Hayter, whose work is frequently labeled something like neo-classical darkwave. Whilst The Blue Woman seemed to crash against the restrictions of opera, turning opera itself into a weapon, then SGR is doing something similar with Appalachian and religious music. Where The Blue Woman has its ominous electronic noise and atonal cello, here the instrumentation is more simple -- a penny whistle, a plucked banjo (Hayter taught herself to play the banjo whilst in lockdown), and sonorous organs. This, like The Blue Woman, is a frighteningly angry piece, but whilst The Blue Woman sounds cold -- blue and melancholic -- this is red raw, unabashedly emotional like a church revival. To offer another comparison, if The Blue Woman sees trauma as a haunting, Gothic story, then SINNER GET READY opens in the visceral gore of a horror story. In “I WHO BEND THE TALL GRASSES” Ignota asks God to intercede for them and the lyrics make the resonances between this and The Blue Woman crystal clear.
TAKE HOLD OF MY GENTLE AXE AND SPLIT HIM OPEN
GATHER UP MY QUIET HAMMER AND NAIL HIM DOWN
USE ANY OF YOUR HEAVENLY MEANS YOUR GOLDEN SCYTHE
YOUR HOLY SWORD YOUR FIERY ARROW STUDDED WITH STARS
I DON’T GIVE A FUCK JUST KILL HIM YOU HAVE TO I’M NOT ASKING
Hayter all but howls the last line quoted, moving from pious religious singing to deep, rending rage with immense control. The album emerges from Hayter’s own testimony about horrifying and deeply violent sexual abuse at the hands of a close partner that left her with potentially life-changing injuries that needed surgery to correct and so the opening tracks are suffused with the desperate rage of the wronged and a heartbroken desire for some fucking vindication.
IF I CANNOT HIDE FROM YOU
NEITHER CAN HE.
The Blue Woman was, in a sense, a musical movement around the aporia-knot of the self, undoing and remaking itself in the wake of trauma whilst Hayter’s music and lyrics are, as the album opens, so deeply conflicted. After the corrosive sludge of CALIGULA, Hayter's previous album, SINNER GET READY sacrifices none of the anger but uses a different musical vocabulary. It would be easy for the uses of religious music, the organ, and simple drumming to lend themselves to a reductive critique of religion, but the theme of the dangerous complexity of devotion is more subtle and more interesting. On the track MANY HANDS Hayter warns that it’s an UNFORGIVING NIGHT when God comes when he ‘SPAT AND HELD ME BY MY NECK/
I WOULD DIE FOR YOU I WOULD DIE FOR YOU HE WEPT/THE LORD HELD ME BY MY NECK/I WISH THINGS COULD BE DIFFERENT HE WEPT. The track builds off a base of bells and cymbals, a percussive hailstorm that lingers just on the edge of falling apart, feeding off the multitracked vocals which rise and fall like a church choir. The opening three tracks are a vision of hell, a grueling endurance test, a sonic Hieronymous Bosch that is both heart-rending and horrifying, wherein psaltery and dulcimer collide with Moog synthesizer screams. On “Pennsylvania Furnace” there’s a respite of sorts as the mood shifts to something far sadder, “Me and the dog we die together” it opens, with Haytner asking the unnamed other party, ‘Do you want to be in hell with me/I know you want to stop but you can’t stop/I’ve watched you alone In the home where you live with your family/And all that I’ve learned is everything burns.’
Devotion costs. Everything can be stripped away in the most violent and unfair and painful of ways. Those who use devotion frequently use it as a tool of immense power to manipulate and control the vulnerable. It is one of the favored tools of charismatic and abusive men to get women to do what they want. But as the album unfolds the record shows the double-edged sword of devotion. The track “The Sacred Linament of Judgement,” uses audio of the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart tearfully apologizing to his congregation for his sexual sins: “get off the stage” comes a scream from the audience. Devotion and piety are sights of horror, of barely contained violence and yet right at the end of the album there is a beautiful devotional song, entitled “The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata”. Religious music is often written off as secondary -- a mechanism for the delivery of lyrics, but neither of the pieces I’ve written about should be treated so glibly. Bowler’s music is an exploration of atonality and electronic noise, the sound of paranoia and pain that resolves rather gently into something hopeful and deeply compassionate. Hayter ends the album with a major key hymn, all beautiful woodwind, and plucked mandolins. There is something so beautifully bold here -- in the wake of a fallen world, where God is dead, where violence and pain and suffering are so often acted out on the body, what does it mean to try and find justice. I’m covered in the blood of Jesus says one of the recorded voices, and yes, aren't we all, up to our necks in blood and pain and loss. Yet even here, in the end, Hayter finds not just pain in the acts and sounds of devotion, but something worth clinging on to as well.