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There is a longstanding legacy of progressive visual artists and designers creating imagery for performance. From Leon Bakst's designs for the Ballet Russe and Erté or Saint Laurent's costumes and sets for the theatre, to Armani and Hockney's opera designs, great innovators of popular culture have ever regarded the opera house as their ultimate destination. In the performing arts, the notion of 'art-fashion fusion' is more historical construct than modern concept.
With a practice as wide-reaching as M/M (Paris)'s, it is only natural that their ongoing project to counter the Modernist rhetoric of design would find its way into opera. In March and June 2004, the Parisian art directors collaborated with esteemed conductor Christophe Rousset and theatre director Éric Vigner on a maverick re-staging of Tommaso Traetta's 1722 opera of Greek myth Antigone. In this captivating film version, M/M implemented a highly-specific cinematographic system to communicate the lexicon of iconography that M/M repeat and build from project to intriguing project.
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According to the Greek legend, Antigone was the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta. After Oedipus left the throne his two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, agreed to rule Thebes in alternate years. At the end of his first year however Eteocles refused to step down. Polynices raised an army which he led against the city. He was defeated but not before he and his brother had killed each other in a duel. Their uncle Creon assumed power. He declared that Eteocles' body should be properly buried, but Polynices should be left unburied on the battlefield. Antigone decides to disobey, arguing that the law of man that violates a religious law is no law at all. She performs a ceremonial burial by sprinkling dust over her brother's body. She is apprehended by guards and Creon decrees that she herself will be buried by being sealed in a cave. Creon's son Haemon, however, is betrothed to Antigone and protests his father's sentence. Creon does not relent until the prophet Tiresias tells him the gods are angry with his treatment of Polynices. But it is too late; when the cave is opened to retrieve Antigone, she has already hung herself. Haemon tries to kill Creon but fails, and commits suicide instead. His mother, Eurydice, also kills herself on hearing what has happened.
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‘ANTIGONA UNDER HYPNOSIS’ |
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M/M (Paris)
Christophe Rousset
Éric Vigner |
