My fingertips paint oil
Part 1: Descendants
This[1] is clearly an ambiguous subtitle. The opera begins with unusual sounds and noises, everything is dark, and I don’t understand what the figures are doing, sitting in a circle and shouting “Ha”. Finally, a sentence reaches me: “My fingertips paint oil between your toes.”
The performers’ faces are now painted, divided by dark and light-coloured lines, some boast tendrils or round spots. They remind me of masks, in the sense of being more interesting and beautiful yet less individual. They walk across the dark floor dotted with light patches, and shout loudly: “Ha ha, we run on glowing coal, burn our hearts. I can’t reach you, I am so helpless!”
These ambiguous spoken words are fascinating.
Part 2: Groundless
It begins with a song that reminds me of classical opera, so deeply moving, so tragic, and it takes me a while to understand the lyrics: “We pick our revenues, hoard possessions, cannot keep anything, can’t get enough.” A woman lets sand trickle through her fingers and spreads it across her arms, reminding me of the childlike pleasure of sitting in the sand by the sea.
Part 3: Cat’s dew
A figure in a shiny cloak emerges from the darkness, slowly getting up from the ground, almost like a bird, a bat, dancing agitatedly. Only now do I realise that this is the sequence that separates the individual scenes from each other. The movement is accompanied by a sound that reminds me of a squeaking wheel. I feel like a child who sees, hears, understands words but doesn’t ‘comprehend’ what ‘it’s all about’ and doesn’t feel safe in the ‘dark’.
The gaze of the camera falls on an embroidered ‘I’ (Ich), then the field of view grows larger, the ‘I’ is part of the clothes worn by a woman singing. A dragon is depicted on another singer’s shirt. The other garments also look like pictures or graffiti. The trousers are buttoned to the tops, reminding me of figures by Pieter Bruegel, whose garments are tied together with strings. Two skeletons feature in the scene: a cat skeleton worn on the head, a human one carried on the back.
The lyrics, “You nursed me with night milk in the morning, with dream sand at noon, in the evening you fed me grief. The next day I was a stranger to you, I rose from the navel of your world and drank the dew off the cats’ fur”, remind me of Paul Celan’s ‘black milk of daybreak’ (schwarze Milch der Frühe). The skeleton is laid down, the woman can now move her arms, the tongue stuck out: “I have licked blood, I am the barking dog that bites you.”
A pause, darkness, the figure keeps lying there for a while, straightens up just a little; a chirping, creaking noise: “I’m looking for you in the darkness, restless, my fingers turn into roots, I cast my breath away, with the night’s umbilical cord I pull you.”
A woman in blue darkness sits with her hair loose, she takes a strip of thin cloth and starts to eat it. The light flickers across the bright piece of fabric that is being pulled up towards the mouth. “Come back to me, into my heart. I pull you out of the sea with the umbilical cord.” The woman pulls the thin ribbon she has just eaten from her mouth, squeezes it out and puts it in the small bowl in front of her feet. Only the subtitles reveal the lyrics to me: “I am unchartered territory, never entered, live with me, lay next to me in the night’s belly.”
A pause, a chirping noise, the figure on the floor is barely moving, kite flying.
In the background, cows are grazing under wind turbines. The landscape is a place of milk production and power generation, not an idyllic spot for passers-by. Two figures are sitting behind a fabric wall, we see them only as shadows, almost as in Plato’s allegory. They pass a small animal skeleton back and forth between them with grace and dignity. Has it once been a cat or a little dragon? A third figure sits motionless behind the white wall, reminding me of non-European cultures.
Final part: Fontanelles
“We put good words into each other’s mouths and hands. The language of eyes, of hands.” A fleck of light appears in the video’s right-hand field of view, it grows larger and moves about as if dancing. “The end is beginning is rhythm is returning.” Incredibly tragic, dense, confusing, unraveling and brilliant, this performative opera in six parts.
Andrea Marbach was born in Salzburg. She grew up in Upper Austria and has lived in Vienna for 33 years. After studying art, she studied art history in Vienna. When she isn’t painting, she works as an art educator at Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
[1] The German word ‘Nachkommen’ has several meanings besides descendants: to follow or come later, to keep up, to comply with.