By rights, Jonathan Best should be worried. Most festival directors would be,
having taken a punt on an unperformed, non-narrative opera about a
post-apocalyptic, post-human creature, sung underwater in an old Victorian
swimming bath. But Best, the director of the Queer Up North festival,
opening in Manchester tomorrow, doesn’t care. “A valid response to someone
doing an underwater opera in a disused swimming bath is ‘really?!’ ”, he
admits. “But when you find an artist who wants to do something
extraordinary, it’s your job as a festival director to say OK.”
Only a certain type of director, actually, and a certain type of festival, but
Queer Up North is precisely that. Best considers it “queer” in the broadest
sense — rather than just “gay”, he takes it to mean “disruptive of the
mainstream”. And You Who Will Emerge from the Flood, an
“operella” created by the LA soprano Juliana Snapper and composer Andrew
Infanti, fits that bill.
The story is this: in a very distant, watery future, one lonely creature
survives — Blorkra, the clumsy result of evolution backtracking from the
human form to allow for a largely aquatic world. This dismal creature spends
her days watching the beach, haunted by visions of her human predecessors.
The scene for this dripping dystopian vision is the stunning first-class males
pool at the Victoria Baths in Manchester (there are second-class males and
females pools, but they get progressively less opulent), an architectural
gem that has been shut for repairs since 1993. A choir will be installed in
the old dressing stalls around the walls, and Snapper (Blorkra, in a
flesh-coloured wetsuit) will be submerged with an oxygen tank in the pool
along with two cameras that will feed to screens and intersperse live
footage of Snapper with animated sequences of two other characters.
Infanti’s unorthodox music will be mixed in with Snapper’s singing. Which is
all very well, but she’s singing underwater. How?
“It’s not that different from singing operatically on land,” claims Snapper,
who has previously worked with the extreme performance artist Ron Athey on The
Judas Cradle, in which she sang hanging upside down until her voice
collapsed. “It uses the same basic process of compressing the air, creating
a stream of soundwaves and allowing that to go into the water, with a little
bit more care because at the end of the phrase you don’t want to pull any
water in.” And how do you not do that? “You monkey with your throat a little
bit. Underwater you really want to be able to shut that door.”
The pressure changes are the worst, “especially within the first 30ft or so.
The oxygen in your lungs has compressed, so you can be down at the bottom
and taking in air, but if I don’t sing on the way up with a lungful of air,
then the lungs will burst because as the air decompresses, it gets bigger,
so it will pop the balloon.”
In this case, fortunately, the pool is only about 6ft deep, but Snapper
intends to take her technique to the sea in the future. She describes the
process of working out how to do it as “trial and error”. “If you get a
couple of tablespoons of water in your lungs, they stop functioning. I had
some scary moments, getting tangled up in the sets and not being able to
surface, or just being a goof and running out of air in my oxygen tank on
the bottom.” She now practises with people on hand to help her out of
difficulty. “It’s completely negotiable as long as you don’t panic,” she
says, blithely.
It’s impossible to imagine what it will sound like. Sound behaves quite
differently in water than in air — Snapper describes the “airless” sound of
a voice filtered through water as “like a humming and mewling”. The bubbles
she produces have their own character. “The vocal melody is complicated by
the percussive sound of the bubbles. If the bubbles are smaller or larger,
then the percussive sounds will come more or less rapidly and they all have
pitches attached to them. Sometimes you have a kind of second melody over
the voice.” But does it sound like singing? “It does. I think it sounds like
singing.” But you wouldn’t know, because you’re under the water, doing it.
“Now I’m wondering!”
Though her conservatory background is pretty standard and her mother was an
opera singer, Snapper shared an interest in 20th-century music with her
elder brother. “Early on I had a sense of music that was changing and I just
expected that opera would be changing as well, with new ideas about music
and tonality.” Her involvement with the punk-rock scene in Berkeley,
California, gave her “the false perception going into the conservatory that
a singer could be a creative person. In fact in the conservatory the singer
is an interpreter, and it took a while to get that through my head. I guess
it never quite got through,” she says. She feels that opera culture,
particularly in America, “doesn’t really acknowledge the past 100-plus
years”.
Snapper is also interested in the voice-as-instrument, inspired to change her
own physiognomy to see what it does to the sound, as with The Judas Cradle.
But doesn’t it damage the voice? “You do need to take care of your voice but
when you get your technique strong it’s pretty hard to completely ruin it,”
she says. “You see career opera singers smoking after their performances and
behaving terribly. You learn how you can abuse the thing that you have
preciously formed.”
It’s certainly queer (and even where there are words, they are all in either
German or Volapük, a language invented in 1880 by Johann Schleyer, a German
Roman Catholic priest, who believed that God had told him in a dream to
create an international language). All of Infanti’s music is written in
archaic musical systems — dodecaphony; an “ultra-chromatic quarter-tone
system”; and a creepy one-sixth-tone scale created (and instantly abandoned)
by the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni. “I don’t think it sounds that good
but I think symbolically it was important to do,” giggles Infanti, who,
despite the geeky meticulousness of the resultant score, doesn’t seem to be
taking it terribly seriously. “All these dodecaphonies and so on,” he says,
“when you hear it, it sounds like wailing.”
It’s unremittingly bonkers, but somehow beguiling. And even if it isn’t, the
baths are worth it.
Jonathan Best, director of Queer Up North, chooses his top picks for the
festival:
Taylor Mac - The Young Ladies Of
Library Theatre, Central Library, St Peter's Square
Part drag act, part play based on letters written to Mac’s father by hundreds
of women while he was in Vietnam
“Some day the British theatre scene is going to wake up to just how good
Taylor is. Time you spend with a Taylor Mac show is like no time you’ll
spend with any other artist.”
Ursula Martinez - My Stories, Your Emails
Library Theatre, Central Library, St Peter's Square
Theatrical, avant-garde comedy based on Martinez’s own observation of the
world - and her fans’ observations of her.
“Genuinely risk-taking; Ursula is a provocateur in the very best sense.”
Chris Goode - The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley
Contact Theatre, Oxford Road
The story of an unlikely friendship between a gay teenaged boy and an
unconventional superhero.
“This is a beautiful show, playing around with the idea of a bedtime story for
adults. Chris loves audiences and his work is always humane, tender and
funny.”
Our Lady J - Gospel for the Godless
The Queer Up North Spiegeltent, Hardman Boulevard, Spinningfields
Gorgeous, glamorous and gospel, Our Lady J transforms the songs of Nine Inch
Nails, Alanis Morissette and Dolly Parton into soul music for the 21st
century.
“She’s a fantastic gospel-singing tranny! You don’t get that in every
festival.”
Starving Artists - Eat Me
Royal Exchange Studio, St Anne's Square
One writer, one performer, one extraordinary show bringing together the US/UK
perspectives on life.
“Really stripped back, espresso strength theatre. The writing is full of
beautiful landscapes
You Who Will Emerge from the Flood is at Victoria Baths, Manchester, on
Sunday. Queer Up North runs from tomorrow to May 25 (www. queerupnorth.com;
0870 066 6845)
