Dissolved

You don't need understanding to appreciate art

‘Ignorant’ is not a thing one wants to be, but you are. You are always ignorant of something. There is always knowledge that hasn’t come into your orbit yet.

Wilful ignorance – turning away – is a kind of psychological defence and is often (but not always) indefensible.

There’s another kind of ignorance though which, for me, is a wondrous thing: the ignorance of being met by art in a state of naïveté and having your heart knocked sideways.

It happened on Thursday night. Sam got us tickets to see The Firebird at Artscape.

Going in, my ignorance was vast. I didn’t know it wasn’t a play. I didn’t know who’d directed it. I didn’t know about the music (this is a central, almost unforgivable ignorance, but hey…).

The music began. Dancers appeared. Some were carrying long poles. One was wearing a white dress and she was clearly the lead, the protagonist of the story that was about to unfold. Towards the back of the stage a big round thing was suspended on to which moving pictures were projected. The animations were drawings that reminded me of William Kentridge’s animations.

I didn’t know what was going on. I tried to put my eyes everywhere – there was a lot happening – to find handholds for my confusion. And then, at a moment I can’t pin down, I felt one side of my mouth go up into a smile and the last rational thought I had was ‘Jessie Buckley often smiles with one side of her mouth. I feel like Jessie Buckley.’ (Jessie Buckley has nothing to do with this. She’s an Irish actor I like.)

Then, the self watching dissolved. I was not me in a tired body with a stiff back from sitting all day. If both sides of my mouth started to smile, I was not aware of it. I no longer tried to understand or interpret. There were not hundreds of people sitting all around me. Sam was not beside me.

I did not exist.

Time ceased.

Something happened on stage. I gasped. The gasp brought me back. It brought time back.

The show was over. The audience rose and we rose with it. The clapping went on and on and on.

I cannot credit the photographer because I couldn’t find their name on the website where I found this image from the show.

I am glad not to be a theatre critic, to be able to allow myself to liquefy, to be able to switch my critical brain off and to be absorbed by something larger, more complex, more astonishing, more awe-inspiring than work and food and emails.

‘Those are people!’ was a thought that came to me while we clapped and the dancers came to the front of the stage to take their bows.

‘People made that happen. Many people. All together. People are amazing!’

Kitsch and criticism

Some time in the Nineties, I heard, by accident, Andrea Bocelli sing ‘Con T Partirò’. I didn’t know who he was. My knowledge of certain kinds of music (opera and classical music especially) is entirely non-existent. But this song arrived – maybe it was in someone car, maybe it was on a television – and it felt like it pulled my chest open and sang itself right into that cavity.

‘Have you heard this?’ I asked someone I’d recently met but who I didn’t know was a music buff. They laughed at me. They told me the song was the height of kitsch.

I was chastened. I never told anyone else I liked that song, and I didn’t actively seek it out again.

I went to listen to it again this morning, just like I went to listen to the Jonathan Livingstone Seagull album a few weeks ago to test whether it was as awful or whether it could still make me happy now that I’m not longer a teenager. The effect of ‘Con Te Partirò’ on me is somewhat dampened but it wasn’t killed by the person with better knowledge who laughed at my kak taste.

I’m glad.

The point here is not to imply that the artistry on the stage at The Firebird (the puppets! the dancers! the costumes!) might be kitsch. I know enough about dance and theatre to know it most certainly was not.

The point I want to make is this: that all that art requires from us is to allow it in. It cannot work its magic in an atmosphere of either cynicism or fear of judgment.

I’m not saying I would have enjoyed the show less had I, as Sam had, read the programme before the curtain went up. The show is too polished, too brilliant for it to have failed to impress me. Reading the programme afterwards I see why it is so brilliant. What a cast. What a creative team.

I’m saying – I’m saying – that ‘understanding’ is not required for art to cast a spell.

People are amazing. They make things that can rattle you around inside your little self.

Art can dissolve you, remove you, transport you, lift you up and lift you out.

Not always. But when it does…god!

Let it.

With love,

as always,

K.