By Jennifer Higgie
Gerhard Staebler, Change, 2014, performance documentation, Borealis Festival, Bergen
Flying into Bergen is not like flying into London. As the plane loses altitude the colourful wooden houses perched on the shores of Norway’s wild, rocky coast come into focus and the surprise is, they’re real, not the figment of some long-dead children’s writer’s imagination. It’s hard to believe that such a quaint harbour town is so deeply immersed in, and welcoming of, the wildly unpredictable vagaries of experimental music. (But then that’s Norway: apparently the country hosts almost one music festival a day.) For once a year for the past ten years, Bergen has been transformed into a place that the Borealis Festival, whose tenth birthday it is this year, describes as: ‘a meeting place, laboratory and development space for adventurous music and ideas’. I had never been to the festival before, and sadly I could only spare a few days but by the end of my stay I had only two regrets: 1) that I hadn’t seen and heard the entire, fascinating programme (I was especially sad to miss Free Exercise, a new work by Marina Rosenfeld, and a ‘guided listening session’ on the history of magic and the occult in music by Rob Young) and 2) that I had forgotten to bring an umbrella. For Bergen’s other claim to fame – apart from music – is that it is the rainiest city in Europe, which sort of means the world. Try and buy an umbrella, though, as I did, and you are doomed, because everyone in Bergen wears Goretex, a material that is a stranger to my skin. A friend of mine once had an exhibition in Bergen and he said, quite seriously, that you couldn’t hear the speeches because of the rustling of Goretex-clad members in the audience. (This is getting off the point, but what was really weird was the amount of hairdressers in Bergen. They were everywhere! This was pointed out to me by the reviews editor of Gramophone magazine, Andrew Meller, and he was right. His great blog on Borealis can be found here: http://www.moosereport.net/borealis/)
But back to the Borealis Festival. This year, it was once again programmed by composer and performer Alwynne Pritchard, who has been its dynamic artistic director of the past six years; her replacement, Peter Meanwell, was formerly a producer at BBC radio 3, and I can vouch for the fact that he knows a terrifying amount about the different ways human beings can express themselves via that loose category we call ‘music’. Along with Meanwell, there’s recently been something of a migration of British talent to Bergen: Martin Clark, formerly Artistic Director of Tate St Ives, became the Director of the Bergen Kunsthalle (replacing Solveig Øvstebø, who relocated to Chicago to become Director of the Renaissance Society) and Ed Gardner is the Principal Guest Conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic.
The festival’s theme this year was ‘Alchemy’, which was justified in the press bumpf thus: ‘In its quest to transform base metals into gold, alchemy evolved a wealth of scientific and spiritual theories, beliefs, practices and rituals from which this year’s programme has evolved. Transformation in its broadest manifestation has always been relevant to artists, but the specifics of alchemy have provided even more localized and remarkable starting points for the musicians we have worked closely with this year. These specially commissioned pieces explore not only the core subject of alchemy, but also ritual, magic and the supernatural … the Festival will be covering subjects ranging from the ancient Leyden papyrus (an instruction manual for extracting precious metals from everyday materials), the transformation of sound through matter, and the art of recording voices from beyond the grave.’ I don’t know about you, but this is the kind of thing that sets my pulse going.
François Sarhan, The Last Lighthouse Keepers, 2014, performance documentation, Borealis Festival, Bergen
Venues for the Festival were scattered all over Bergen. The first night of my visit we walked through the charming, rainy streets to an old tuna-canning factory on the edge of the bay that has been turned into an arts centre, the USF, to see and hear François Sarhan’s new work The Last Lighthouse Keepers. We all sat on red cushions in the middle of floor, surrounded by large photocopies and mobiles roughly taped to the walls and hanging from the ceiling: a huge hand pouring liquid, pianos, ladders and clocks (yes, Surrealism 101). Four performers – Céline Bernard (foley artist), Mark Knoop (on piano), Adam Rosenblatt (percussion) and Sarhan himself – then proceeded to create an moody narrative about dislocation and creativity that swiftly moved between absurdity, farce, and suddenly touching moments of vulnerability. Sarhan – in a standard classical music black suit but with bare feet (everyone had bare feet I assume to better signify dream state/openness/unconventionality), stood in front of the piano. To the accompaniment of a piece for solo piano that evoked, in turn, a Satie-esque lyricism, minimalism and echoes of Gershwin, Sarhan intoned lines including ‘It has always been a source of amazement’; ‘there’s not a real moment when I decided … to become a musician’; ‘I think I was formatted totally formless’, etc. Eventually, after an inspired marimba performance, and an increasingly frenzied dance of performers around the room tearing everything down, peace reigned. I thought it a curious work: inventive, compelling, even, at times, moving, but also a little corny (clocks and ladders?). In an interview afterwards, Sarhan (who has collaborated with William Kentridge) explained his thought processes, declaring that ‘the real artists are the lighthouse keepers’ and, warming, to his metaphor, explaining that ‘as lighthouses are becoming redundant with GPS, nobody needs what we do’. Describing a paradox that became familiar at Borealis, Sarhan spoke of how, in his opinion, we need stories in order both to explain reality and to escape it. His role as ‘the actor’ in The Last Lighthouse Keepers embodies an-all-too familiar strategy in the art world of being unable to express something with words, and so employing images to do the job. Here, however, the music was more interesting than the images – but then I guess it was a music festival.
Felix Kubin, Paralektronoia, 2014, performance documentation, Borealis Festival, Bergen
Next on the agenda, back at the packed Landmark venue (next to the Kunsthalle) was Felix Kubin’s amusing and rather wonderful lecture/performance Paralektronoia, an updated version of his 2004 radio play about electricity, ghosts and paranoia, based on interviews with various characters – from scientists to artists and other people whose jobs I wasn’t entirely clear about, but who regularly heard disembodied voices (one woman explained that she was ‘actually like an antenna’). As Kubin declared a tad defensively at the beginning of the piece: ‘I am an artist, not a scientist and an artist can do whatever they want to do’. I loved Paralektronoia, not least for its sympathy for the dead and for its sonic surprises. As one of his contacts declared: ‘I think ghosts have a difficult time these days. It is difficult for them to be left alone.’
Kurt Johannessen and Simon Phillips, Biblioludium, 2014, performance ephemera, Borealis Festival, Bergen
The next day, I walked through the rain to the Bergen Public Library to hear/see Biblioludium, a collaboration between pianist Simon Phillips and Norwegian poet Kurt Johannessen that was held in a small crowded room that steamed slightly with the damp from everyone’s clothes. The piece apparently developed from two simple questions: Could a sentence become a score? What happens if a poem drowns in the sound of a piano? What transpired was an exercise in distilled minimalism, if that’s not a tautology. (It somehow seemed more minimal than minimal.) Here’s what happened: Johannessen, in a black tshirt, a jacket, and a sweet, faintly bewildered smile, tapped the microphone, as if testing its sound. This went on for a while; Philips then took up the rhythm on the wood of the piano. Johannessen then slowly gave out pieces of paper to every member of the audience, and smiled warmly at them. I, too, was smiled at and given a slip of paper, which had one sentence on it, but it was in Norwegian, which I don’t speak. (I gave it later to a local person I met, who promised to translate it for me and email me, but they never did. Sad.) Apparently they were poems. Johannessen drank water if the exertion got too much. Seemingly random notes were played at unexpected intervals on the piano. At one point, Johannessen lit a torch and asked a member of the audience to get under it with him. I’m not sure what happened under there but they emerged eventually. Then, Johannessen worked his way back through the audience again, handing out more paper. One man said ‘no’ to the note, and shook his head, as if bored or disgusted by the performance. I don’t know what he was so mad about; he could have left. Despite my incomprehension, there was something rather great about it all; the way everything slowed right down and clarity, for once, wasn’t privileged over a kind of enigmatic delicacy.
From there, we walked back to USF to see a screening of the 2002 film A Bookshelf on Top of the Sky: 12 Stories About John Zorn by Claudia Heuermann. I had three problems with it: a) I was totally drenched from the rain, which had turned into snow, and so a little preoccupied with trying to get dry, and b) the film was shot by someone whose hands shook the whole time, and so I got travel sick in about ten minutes c) John Zorn came across as possibly the most arrogant man alive. So I left, went back to my hotel, had a hot shower and dried off. By the way, I should mention the incredible hospitality, and the helpful army of volunteers: the festival put on a free vegetarian kitchen for visitors to the Festival, and the soup was delicious.
Fausto Romitelli, An Index of Metals, 2014, performance documentation, Borealis Festival, Bergen
A while later I returned to the USF for possibly the most talked-about and anticipated performance of the Festival: the Italian composer Fausto Romitelli’s An Index of Metals, performed by the BIT20 Ensemble, which comprised 11 amplified instruments conducted by Baldur Brönnimann. The soprano was Christina Daletska, who had something of the Viking about her. Romitelli died of cancer at 41 ten years ago; An Index of Metals was the last work he composed (Kenka Lèkovich’s wrote the libretto) and it is full of foreboding, anger and a terrible sense of inevitability. It opened beautifully, with repeated, anguished phrases, like a heartbeat gone wrong; projections of abstract patterns that evoked mutating cells drifted in and out of focus. Daletska’s voice was like sunlight in clouds that gradually developed into an operatic howl. As it developed, however, I had problems with its melodrama; it was pitched so relentlessly at an acute level of emotional anguish that despite its power, it grew wearisome at times, and at moments, veered too close to rock opera. Also, I thought the mix was bad; the levels were all over the place, but nonetheless, I’m glad I heard it. It was brilliant, moving, flawed. Terrible to think of this young composer’s potential, stopped, so tragically, mid-flow.
We then all trooped back over to the Kulturhuset for Bass Drum, a 90-minute performance by Morten J. Olsen, a rather wonderful percussionist who lives in Stavanger, further down the coast in Norway. He was positioned in the middle of an empty gallery, with (you guessed it) an enormous bass drum. We sat around the edge, watching, listening, as he did all manner of things to it with a huge variety of objects, from domestic items to what looked like hand-made sculptures (I could be wrong). I found it hypnotic, soothing even after the anguish of An Index of Metals.
At midnight next door, in Landmark, was the most joyous 90 minutes or so of the festival: the magnificent US band Deerhoof, whose sheer inventive brilliance is matched by drummer’s Greg Saunier’s repartee (he is eerily like Jim Carrey) and Satomi Matsuzaki’s manic dancing (on two occasions she bought the stack of amps down, but no-one seemed to mind). It was immense fun. They seemed like nice people, too. They had such an early morning flight they decided to stay up all night. Rumour had it that Saunier, accompanied by a mug of Earl Grey tea, was seen vacuuming the venue in the wee hours.
Øyvind Torvund, Constructing Jungle Books, 2014, performance documentation, Borealis Festival, Bergen
The next day was my last day, and I was lucky I got to see/hear Øyvind Torvund’s commission for Borealis, Constructing Jungle Books, a sonic collage of music inspired by the composer’s research into jungle field recordings from the Berlin Natural History Museum. It was performed by the 24 or so members of Berlin’s Splitter Orchester in an atmospheric, crumbling old warehouse on the edge of town, overlooking the water. As the rain fell steadily outside, the music evoked time travel as much as travel into a jungle: a harpsichord, a cellist, a double bass, a guitarist and a flautist shared the stage with a man playing a spoon and turntable. The composition comprised samples of other music – both from centuries ago and last week – other animals, other places, the howls of wild animals, the faint intimation of crickets and birdsong and a trombone’s lament. It stayed with me as I flew back to London, later that day. When I landed, I thought: next year, I want to return.