Where did you get the idea for an opera in collaboration with the Australian composer Rósa Lind based on Hiroshima Mon Amour?
Rósa Lind and I met during a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity over ten years ago. We hit it off artistically right away and soon came up with the idea of doing an opera together. But Rósa Lind was very reluctant because she was well aware that opera is a man’s world with almost no women composers. Despite that, one day she suggested to me the idea of working on Hiroshima Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras. When I re-read the script that Duras wrote for the film by Alain Resnais, it was immediately obvious to me that it could work. In fact, in her introduction to the screenplay published by Gallimard in 1960, Duras herself stated that her text had an “operatic intent.” Because it’s impossible to represent this extremely violent and traumatic event that affected the whole world, her characters instead evoke its memory by expressing themselves through allegory. Our project is very close in spirit to hers, since we too work with memories—of Hiroshima and also of Duras’ works, Resnais’ film, and recent history, which reminds us that the possibility of war is growing again and the world is just as dangerous today. The music and songs immerse us in intense emotions, which are so dense that it’s difficult for words to convey them.
You started with Duras’ text and made significant cuts to produce the opera’s libretto. How did you approach adapting the text in order to serve the music?
In a short essay entitled “Ribbons of Magnesium,” the English dramaturge Martin Crimp, who has written several librettos himself, discusses the difference between theatrical and operatic writing. He states that in the theatre, even when there is no—or not much—action per se, as in Beckett for example, it is imperative that the situation continues to evolve through the writing. But in opera, it’s the music that propels the show forward. Freed from that responsibility, the text is allowed to stand still, to express something other than advancing a story. This new possibility really inspired me. What made it even more fertile as an approach was the fact that the original work has a sense of time that’s at once powerful and ambiguous: while time markers are very present in the writing, the moment that it portrays is situated in a kind of temporal suspension or confusion. The other thing that guided my choices for the libretto was the sonority of the words. Throughout the work of adapting it, I asked myself, “What do I hear that could be sung in this text?” Duras’ voice is of course emblematic of her writing, and I tried to draw on its uniqueness when shaping her text. Her serious tone and slow diction produce an inimitable prosody, which has a song-like quality.
This is your first venture into the world of opera. As a director, how did this new medium enhance your artistic process?
For years, my theatre work has led me to seek a dramaturgical structure that allows me to make a pact with the audience, building step by step the conventions of dramatic acting through which the performers embody the characters. In opera, this element does not play much of a role. I always find it strange: I’m supposed to believe the people on stage are real, but they express themselves through singing! The language of opera is highly codified, and shaking up those conventions is one of the things I find interesting about this project. Duras’ writing provides rich materials for that purpose. For me, her work prefigures all our contemporary ideas about fiction. In Hiroshima Mon Amour, the two lovers evoke a third character, the German lover, bringing him into existence in a unique way. Rather than naming him, they invent him by engaging in a kind of brainstorming to try and express what he was and what he could have been. We also include this evocation of possibilities in our show by using mise en abyme. The drama is established gradually via the use of various devices. The figure of the writer is brought on stage, represented by the conductor, who is also a singer, which it seems to me is completely unexpected in the world of opera. Thanks to the presence on stage of filmmaker Karl Lemieux, we are able to embody the figure of the German lover. And when Karl “destroys” the film of Resnais’ movie live, his transformation of the material becomes an analogy for war. The alteration of the film suggests how the bombing of Hiroshima altered the world.
