Marie Glassl on BBB - A hyper Glitch-Opera
On the first gaze the works of Emma Waltraud Howes seem incongruously out of time. One enters another world: meets mushrooms and corals, glass artichoke-hand grenades, the cross-section of which recurs in her graphic scores - cartographies that in turn provide the basis for her choreographic works. Drawings of allegorical sparrow figures are transformed into hand-painted costumes reminiscent of parachute-silk Arcimboldos during the process.
We meet them, the three figures on their score - drawn from an artichoke’s heart, it shows the constant blossoming and unblossoming, a black and white rite of spring between the openness towards the Other and a withdrawal to the internal. But the score also notates the rules of the match: It’s the social game, the theatre of Society, and what is at stake here is the question of subjectivity. Is the graphic code a playing field or a prison? Are the players the masterly subjects of the game or subjected to its rules? The scorekeepers on their side benches there to serve their game or rather to keep them in check; sarcastic guardians of a much deeper knowledge that the chorus of glass artichokes whispers into their ears, always ready to become the hand grenade of a society in its death throes.
Battle, Narcissist, Cornucopia, cadavres exquises, waiting for a new dawn; a threesome that is neither one nor separated – the triangular conversation that runs through the history of our civilisation: the family; the ego, id and superego; the three-folded-goddess.
Inhale. A deep breath, get ready for the test: Inflation. A celebration of the attempt. Receptive Withdrawal. Engaging in a Sisyphean task: the hybris of immortality, the compulsion to repeat – but also the repetitive inhalation–exhalation of archaic trance practices and breath control. The scorekeepers keep score and everything in its place.
The performers move between soft headbanging, classical gestures of rhetoric and mannerisms of contemporary etiquette, performing the ritual of the Baroque Court Social, increasingly drunk on their own incapacity to connect, while everything starts to glitch and glitter and glide. Incrementally drunk, incrementally optimistic.
A barnacle-crowned whale measures time, a baroque soprano singer growls. A surreal world appears where social norm turns abstract and erroneous overlaps of the imaginary and the real, human and object blur in glitches, unintentional slips. Error becomes a "passage" to the construction of a utopian world. The Metronome Timekeeper keeps time in that he preserves it. Time is out of joint between history, future and speculative mythologies. Aria Monumental invites us to a glitch opera to reveal alternative ways of seeing. Glittering gold, Tilt, celebration of the weird, the eerie, the illogical. Until she has to give up, confronted with the materiality of crisis, a crumbling but forced representation. Growlingly wandering off to other courts.
A deep sigh; of relief or despair? Exhale, Deflation. Back to work. Until we glitch again, with a cocktail chalice in hand.
Text/dramaturgy for Bang Bang Baroque by Emma Waltraud Howes