SCARY BEAUTY.
Composed by Keiichiro Shibuya. Android production by Hiroshi Ishiguro. Accompanied by the Adelaide Art Orchestra under the direction of composer/trumpeter, Peter Knight. The Space Theatre. Adelaide Festival Centre. OzAsia Festival. October 1 2017.
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
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| Skeleto. - Scary Beauty - The Future of Al Robot |
The eyes flicker spasmodically. The white masked face
swivels slowly while the white gloved hands jerk in accompaniment to the
electronic voice of Skeleton, the singing android. The haunting sounds of the
six piece Adelaide Art Orchestra conjure a desolate landscape of sweeping,
shrill winds, luring the senses into a wasteland of the human spirit, corrupted
by the innovative invention of Japanese composer Keiichiro Shibuya. Percussion,
wind and strings conjure a landscape of dehumanized sentiment and aspiration.
Created by a team of engineers under Hiroshi Ishiguro with Kohei Ogawa, the
android, clothed in black and adorned by red strands of wool, sings of love
embraced on the eve of death and the futility of existence in three movements.
Knight refers to it as “the Australian Jazz of 2017”, improvised, random and
evocative in its musicality.
As I watch Skeleton’s mesmerizing “dance”, reflected in the
video with words of the opera upon the screen, I am reminded of the Japanese dance
form, Butoh, often referred to as the force that exists between the flesh and
the bone, the erupting scream for identity. As a chilling and exhilarating emerging
art form Skeleton’s androidal performance could be described as the song between
the flesh and the bone. “She” intones
the despair of struggle, the desire for love and the scorn of the pursuit of
happiness.
As Stockhausen radically changed the way we regard music in
the Sixties, so too has Shibuya with
Knight and their team challenged
accepted musical genres and radicalized our view of music and opera in a
rapidly changing digital and technological age. To some, Skeleton’s song,
accompanied by Adelaide’s leading improvisational and contemporary orchestra,
may appear discordant, defying rules of harmony and assonance. To others it will
be an exciting and thrilling way of identifying a new movement and by its
assault on perceptions of humanity define the very essence of humanity. It is
the gist of collaboration between Western and Asian art forms.
In the first movement, Skeleton performs in operatic voice
the excerpt from Michael Houllebeca’s Possibility
of an Island. In the midst of terror
and the abyss, there is love and hope. Instead there is the scary beauty of “a
kind of joy that descends from the physical world”. In the second movement of
this intriguing electronic composition, Shibuya draws on Yukio Mishima’s The Decay of the Angel. Skeleton sings
in electronic tones, “There is no special right to happiness and none to
unhappiness. There is no tragedy and no genius.” In the final movement, which is largely
improvised, the work draws on the chaotic and purposefully random musings of
rebellion and meaning to existence with The
Third Mind by William Burroughs, the writings of Brion Gysin. and excerpts
from Sinclair Belles prose poem Stalin. It
is a cacophony of contemporary existential
contemplation, often meaningless, recalling Lucky’s diatribe from
Beckett’s Waiting For Godot in a mire of absurdist philosophizing.
Scary Beauty fascinates and intrigues. A new musical art
form demands investigation and confronts the ordered reality of our existence.
It offers both hope and despair. It challenges both preconception and
expectation. To the untrained musical ear it is thirty five minutes of
confrontation with our own perception of our universe and the meaning of our
lives. It may not be to everybody’s taste but it is a glimpse into the future
and the questions that such a future will demand. To that end, it is one of the
most stimulating, disturbing, confronting and exciting performances that I have seen in recent times.