Song of Lears, another vision

"Song of Lear" never should be an exception in the life of a student.

When these days, some people asked me about a movie or a book, I didn't remember this performance.  This report is for these nice people whose I obtain energies to get up every day.

I've written two reports about my personal feelings after seeing "Song of Lear"; those days, I was impressed about it vision, although I thought that I would need to watch it another times. Finally I didn't do it; it's for that I've looked for other reports that help me to explain my love about this musical and theatrical performance.

A country as Poland may cause these bands, lovers of classical writers instead there's a country where a minister talks about plastic and music education as two subjects that don't help developing the children rather than an exception to the top?

When an illiterate and salesman uses the Medias to spread these ideas, a country could be a banana republic where the beliefs of a group try to drive the lives of a country

Near my village this autumn, I'll dream on that hour where my spirit flew without understand all that beauty but it was absolutely mine. They're so many language around us. Who wants to imprison its?


Some written on "Song of Lear"

• This was theatre told through song from a company that take themselves and their work very, very seriously; in fact, to an extent where it almost becomes laughable. A piece of work so highbrow it sits at the top of a skyscraper, this is possibly not the show for you if your all time favourite fringe experience is Late Night Gimp Fight. But Song Of Lear is good. It's very, very good. At times percussion and song combine to reach stratospheric moments of pure spiritual edification. I loved it.
  
  . A non-linear dramatic event that shows the world of subtle energies and rhythms that govern Shakespeare’s tragedy. The ensemble members have chosen crucial scenes from King Lear to weave a story out of gestures, words and music. Each song emerges as a starting point for another dramatic poem. Songs of Lear is a constantly evolving creative research project, where the music becomes character, relationships and events. An international award-winning ensemble company, that draws young performers from all over the world to participate in its extensive artistic and pedagogical program. www.culture.pl/edinburgh
  
  .  "Songs of Lear" by song of the Goat Theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe
  “Isn’t a song almost like a poem”, asks Grzegorz Bral, and isn’t a choir almost like a performance group? Bral is standing before us shaven-headed in a sports jacket, his choir dressed in sombre fitted black, making interjections to explain this ‘research project’ which is in the tradition of Polish theatre an intensely-scrutinised, minutely drawn-out processual thing – at is arrives with us taking the guise of something like a deconstructed traditional church choir: resurrecting the bodies, letting light and heat into the cloister.

Song of the Goat, we are told, have approached King Lear in the same way Kandinsky approaches landscapes. And just as the malleable constructivist had geometry hallucinate its own horizons, pulling between hard formal abstractions and revolutionary energy, Songs of Lear looks to asplode the Shakespeare’s towering tragedy into an (almost) seamless collection of limpid lines and bottomless rivulets of emotion; from the orderliness of a choral song cycle summoning concentric ripples of monstrous tragic energy.

In sober non-linearity we are given a ten songs, “conversational songs, character songs, weeping songs”. Beginning in paradise, before the Kingdom begins to quake, there is a decorum to the classical arrangements, reminiscent of the choral controlled waveforms of Renaissance polyphony, a Byrd or Tallis perhaps: western and organised, interior and measured with solemn intervals. Soon enough Gabriel Gawin, the pater familias of the singers, stands slightly aside, and we begin to get our characters parthenogenetically splitting from the whole: the jester played as an ebullient chirpy, infinitely prodding babbler by the most senior woman of the group, and Cordelia on whom the piece begins to rest.

For the first of Cordelia’s three Laments this classical idiom is cast against the gutteral wall, a lacerating rock face in contralto of Coptic chant. The Balkan bagpipes (Gaida) ratchet up the pressure and compress the range into guttural dirge. Yet it doesn’t break, and part of the formal brilliance of this piece is the recognition of the narrative continuities between these two distinct musics. The Paradiso I of picturesque Northern harmony is tonally worlds apart from the Southern sea wreck of Coptic Paradiso II, and yet they here in this carefully aestheticised choir and clever compositions they are fiercely melded into a singular unfolding sonic story. In a similar twist of continuity the energies of Lear here are predominantly feminine without losing the play’s rough shape, from the jester’s unplugging of the pompous vacillating King, eliding Lear’s madness in favour of conversations, and in the extraordinary laments of the betrayed daughter.

The final of these laments begins plangently, wistfully, like buttercups in cold mist, before mounting pace and strength, becoming a tear in summer linen, the pulse of a wintry heart, the autumnal agony of prolonged endings. Through this Coptic idiom privileging power over grace, looking to nature over the voice that seeks its modulation, we are taken from the structures of civilisation to the wounded heart, from the music of the spheres to the collapse of worlds. Elsewhere in the piece there are clever experiments with vocal harmonic overtones (singing two notes at once) and the employment of a set of discs which alternate as visual fans and drum skins, but it’s everything that’s poured into this central scream which scores the piece so deeply into the old Bard’s nature.

Teatr Pieśń Kozła (Song of the Goat Theatre) has been hailed as the most exciting and innovative of the new Avant-garde theatre movements in Poland. 'Songs of Lear' is a non-linear dramatic event that shows the world of subtle energies and rhythms that govern Shakespeare’s tragedy. The ensemble members have chosen crucial scenes from King Lear to weave a story out of gestures, words and music. Each song is a starting point for another ‘dramatic poem’. Here the music becomes character, relationships and events.

The creative process has been divided into several phases: preparation of the concert, dramatizing the songs (an oratorio), creating movement and visual structures, integrating text, music and movement and finally molding the performance into a mature shape. Songs of Lear is a constantly evolving creative research project in which audience may witness a very intimate artistic process.
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