CREDO—the Innocence of God. A multimedia music theatre Fabrica
Reviewed by Maggie Helass
The Queensland Music Festival opened on July 15 with a multi-media music theatre embracing three continents in a eulogy to Islam, Judaism, Christianity. The libretto explored the absurdity of ethnic and religious conflict.
Three movie screens behind the orchestra opened satellite windows to Istanbul, Jerusalem and Belfast—where musicians and poets conducted a live dialogue with a packed Brisbane Concert Hall.
Composer and conductor Andrea Molino had the task of morphing the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in and out of ballads from Northern Ireland, a percussion extravaganza in Istanbul, creating sonic landscapes with exotic musical instruments such as the kanun, mey, darbuka, the kamanche, and ney flute.
William Barton, Australia’s best-known didgeridoo custodian, provided an anchor hold for those of us who sometimes lost track of which continent we were on.
Words were a pastiche of wisdom literature which began with the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel and ended with Kahlil Gibran and Hans Kung.
The work of exploring human expression beyond language (which was confused at Babel to confound the hubris of mankind) belonged to experimental vocalist David Moss, Swiss-Ghanaian Joy Frempong, and Gunnlaug Thorvaldsdottir from Iceland.
Moss’s centre-stage vocal acrobatics incarnated an earth creature—gurgling, muttering, gasping at the primal boundary of language. Frempong and Thorvaldsdottir, a black and a white woman in big-screen close-ups, together portrayed the spine-tingling intimacy between screaming and song—the stratosphere of language where music takes over.
Today’s existential angst in a meaningless world was poignantly captured in twin video clips of an Israeli mother whose son had survived a bombing in Jerusalem, and the Arab mother of the suicide bomber. These grieving women’s words showed in vignette how the cycle of violence begins on the doorstep of a society.
Video-taped stories from young people living in the world’s heart of ethnic and religious conflict provided a useful discussion of fear and the structure of evil.
Mick Dodson made a startling appearance on screen, in close-up eye contact with the audience, voicing key words in synch with narrative from Erich Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.
A section entitled The Bastards and the Assembly of the Lord brought to the screens young people with parents of mixed cultures and religion. Some came from left field, appreciating being both Israeli and Arab, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu—hybrids bringing worlds together.
CREDO is a global project, adaptable to many cultures, and Australian artists spent time at the Fabrica workshop in Karlsruhe, Germany, to acculturate the music theatre for dissemination in Australia.
CREDO gave a glimpse of a new form of communication. The immediacy of television news provided by the live link, combined with the intimacy of dialogue via telecommunication, the intense community experience of the movie house, and the visceral confrontation of live theatre shrank world conflict into a crystal ball. At the end of the two-hour ‘performance’, when musicians in Brisbane, the Middle East and Northern Ireland all bowed to applause from the Queensland public, one had a keen sense of understanding what is happening in the world. Our daily diet of news media seemed thin rations by comparison.
A risk of borrowing literature for a libretto is that, although the text has integrity in its home context, it may be compromised in an exotic environment. Hans Kung’s words on bridge building, for instance, although undeniably true in their original context, sounded anachronistic, almost trite, as a finale to the sound and fury of CREDO.
The progress of CREDO is worth watching as a cross-cultural phenomenon. The world’s monotheistic religions have long since become lost in the fog of jargon. CREDO is a sincere attempt to reinvent a language for religion and culture that makes interfaith dialogue possible.