A COMPELLING FALL INTO THE DARK

Monna Dithmer in the leading Danish newspaper Politiken

You will hear Orpheus sing at the price of your eyes. A compelling fall into the dark and death looks back.

Operation:Orfeo takes action again. In times when the impact of theatre tends to be ephemeral and when new dramatic art in particular seems to share the fate of May flies - here today gone tomorrow - it is a source of great pleasure to discover that Hotel Pro Forma's visual opera from 93 - one of the most epoch-making performances of recent years and recently the main attraction in the cultural promotion of Denmark in Australia - is re-staged at the Royal Theatre. Yet again it proves to be nothing short of a modern classic and, in addition to this, a crystal-clear demonstration of the new spatial dimension that characterises the dramatic language of theatre today.

When according to the myth, Orpheus is about to descend into the land of the dead in order to bring Euridice back to life one first encounters, in theatre magician Kirsten Dehlholm's skilful grip on her material, 20 minutes of darkness. Inside a white frame the stage appears as a trembling expanse of darkness. Just as Orpheus must not for anything in the world turn around and look at his loved one, so the audience must give up their usual way of looking at theatre.

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Gradually one focuses on the dim outline of the chorus sitting like birds of sorrow, chiselled into position since antiquity. And then scenic space emerges as a grand white monumental staircase - Maja Ravn's emphatic ending point of all the stairs that have wound their way up through centuries of stage settings. This space is meant for passage, descent and ascent - for experiencing the threshold between life and death.

However, one does not encounter any Orpheus searching for his beloved Euridice. One finds only the chorus set in position like black chessmen. A priesthood wearing crowns that recall fairy tales and solid shoes, a priesthood performing a high-flown ritual.

Maybe the spectator is in fact an Orpheus thrown into a search for what has been lost reaching out with all senses for 'contours of body'? For the bodies of the chorus from where a single Euridice stands out: Slowly, step by step, she glides down the stairs drawing the fatal line of fall.

Although they do acquire a human face through all their little buffonist attributes, the chorus, like Euridice, seems to disappear beyond reach. In a powerful flash of lighting the three stage dimensions are transformed into a flat surface. And quick as lightening the stalking bodies merge with space, they become abstract ornaments or black diagonal incisions on the flat surface yet reappear moments later as hovering mirages. From living body to statuesque form and yet they are ready for a revival!

This is pure optical illusion. And at the same time these bodily transformations occur in the most beautiful allusions to the myth of Orpheus.

One of the greatest love stories of the Western world is thus played out between an Orpheus of song and a Euridice of space.

A dance of death between space as depth and surface, between a vertical and a horizontal axis - shifting symbols of life and death, and then the song which free of obstacles flows through the musical scales of the bodies. Whether dead or alive they are the bearers of the fourth dimension in music which floods the cool austerity of space like a tide of emotions

In all its chill-off purity this is one of the most passionate encounters between music and space I can recall. And the apotheosis is still inimitable: space and music open up towards the heavenly high and the audience sinks into a sea of emerald-green laser light. As a sign of how the lost pathos of Euridice, 'blackened by oblivion', has come alive.

Hotel Pro Forma offer a new breath that makes theatre encompass so much more that its usual three dimensions.