I regularly used to visit Faversham Kent in my tug Pablo, just to get away and reflect a bit. Two words came into my head on one of these visits in Summer 1999 - ‘fleeting’ and ‘opera’. It combined two things that were special to me. On my mother’s side had been opera singers in Florence in Italy, and fleeting was the word used on the Thames to describe the moment when a boat goes afloat on the incoming flood tide.
Putting the two together created an intriguing title - ‘Fleeting Opera’.
I immediately realised the potential. Nearly all opera has been on the land. Why not create a completely new genre on the water? Hence why Fleeting Opera was not so much a title, as a description of a new genre. I liked this idea. Opera had always been an absurdity of sorts, created originally in Italy a few hundred years ago to entertain the Court.
Having been making performances since 1976, I decided it was time to branch out. I needed the platform next. Inevitably, it had to be on the Thames, which I had lived on since nearly two decades. Plus I needed some good people to work with, like I had just done in the Rudder performance in Antwerp three years earlier.
By happenstance, I got invited in mid 1999 by the then Government Office for London to create something visual on the Thames to celebrate the upcoming London Millennium Night celebrations. This in turn led myself and my Couper Collection by Albert Bridge being invited to be a Focus Site of the proposed London String of Pearls Millennium Festival 2000. This was helped by the fact that the then Home Secretary Jack Straw had decided in 1999 to launch the Couper Collection during his official opening of the new Charity Commission HQ in London.
I was asked in late 1999 to make a presentation about my Fleeting Opera idea to fellow participants of the London String of Pearls Millennium Festival, which included The Royal Opera House and the English National Opera company. So I presented the idea of creating my Fleeting Opera on my barges on the Thames. Both were interested to collaborate with me on this.
I ended up deciding to work with the Royal Opera House, because I was very interested in dance and the Opera House also housed the Royal Ballet in London. They had rarely worked together on a piece, but soon they decided to, alongside the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House which serviced both the Royal Ballet and the Royal Opera.
Once this was settled in Autumn 1999, I reverted to the invitation from the Government Office for London. I had originally turned them down, but I realised that somebody needed to fund the ambitious large scale Blazons set made out of expensive silk that I was by then planning for my Fleeting Opera with The Royal Opera House. I went back to them and proposed the Blazons as a self-erecting grand display on two 30m masts, that could be lifted and retracted as the display went down the river in central London on the Thames on Millennium night 2000, which was by then just a couple of months away.
This turned out to be a very complex and costly operation. First I found a company that could design the masts and create the ability to winch them up and down whilst underway and going under the low bridges. Then a company to make the large scale Blazons out of silk, which turned out to be a sailmaker’s yard in Burnham on Crouch..
To my surprise, somehow the actress Judi Dench found out about the event, and offered to perform in the piece. Hence her role on board Fleeting Opera 2000 as narrator.
The final part of the jigsaw was an invitation from Her Majesty’s UK Government to perform Fleeting Opera 2000 to Parliamentarians on the Terrace of the Houses of Parliament, facing the Thames, on the evening of Close of Parliament 27 July 2000.
I could have spent a life trying to make such a piece, but the force of the impending government obligation to do something out of the ordinary for the Millennium celebrations, made it possible – from concept to delivery in little short of one year. The British are usually very conservative, but getting caught in the spotlight of being part of the global Millennium Night celebrations soon changed that.
Fleeting Opera 2000, episode one ‘Birthrite’, a Contemporary Floating Opera and Ballet for the River Thames, was eventually performed by The London Royal Opera, Royal Ballet, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House and actress Judi Dench; first by Battersea Park on 26 July 2000; and then at the Close of Parliament and South Bank on 27 July 2000.
It was created with my collaborators; composer Trevor Wishart, textile artist Sasha Kingston and Royal Ballet choreographer Tom Sapsford.
I avoided working with narrative, or anything which required viewing from beginning to end, and decided to explore ritual instead. This provided an open-ended vehicle, which allowed the spectator to view the work in fleeting abstracted passages. The backing-track, constructed on computer by Trevor Wishart, gave a sculptural feel to the overall piece, and provided a basic cue structure to the score he created.
Constructing the vocal passages in different metres to one another added a certain element of chance into the interpretation of the score. This created a polyrhythmic structure where the singers and musicians locked together harmonically in shifting accents. The invented language and costumes reflected a fictional culture fused from many places from over the seas. The metalised silk suspended from the rigging, and the amplified sound and lighting that carried the piece to the shoreline, then had to be of large scale to fit the size of the river.
To me, what makes an event opera is passion and a sense of the absurd. Rivers have always been associated with the idea of fertility and renewal, so sexuality was implicit in the piece right from the start. This fitted my basic operatic idea of attraction and repellence between the opposite sexes, and the two barges, in the opera. The pregnant matriarch at the centre of the opera provided a simple image of fertility to which the performers and audience were naturally drawn towards.
There was an irony in performing the opera to Parliament, our modern day court, and in the introduction of the spoken word by Judi Dench. This brought the piece by accident back to the origins of early opera itself, as well as fusing a lot of elements including ballet and theatre. Opera was born in Italy out of the combination of spectacle and music performed for the court, with experiments to revive the use of speech, as they had imagined it in ancient Greek theatre.
In the opera itself, the event polarised around the chemistry between three extraordinary women; the dancer Deborah Bull, the actress Judi Dench and the soprano Kate McCarney.
The tide of the river flowing in was the life at the heart of the opera, the returning force of renewal. Throughout there was a continuous struggle going on, of the winchmen pulling the barges together and apart against the force of the tide and the screw of the tugboat. All of these activities were being marshalled and controlled by a production crew deep inside one barge and invisible to the audience. Inside the other barge was a mass of sound equipment and engineers being co-ordinated by Trevor Wishart, whose only contact with the performance was through headphones. Ahead in the tugboat I had the delicate task of keeping the barges from snaking about too much and at the right distance from the audience on the bank, whilst directing events.
The opera was dominated both evenings by an unusually vivid summer’s sky. It veered from a turquoise blue early on, to cobalt blue as the night deepened. My over-riding memory is of the orange silk of the performers’ garments against the blue of the sky, combined with the motion of dancers, and a soundscape emanating from the barges that echoed all around the river. Finally arriving at Parliament seemed like the most bizarre of historical time-warps - aware that this was the first waterborne pageant to have arrived there since the middle ages.
The function of the dance was to be a seduction and animation between the boats; linking the singers, the musicians and the sound-track into an interactive whole. The whole fleeting opera becoming a vehicle of movement, light and sound transmitted over the water, with the dance as the dynamic drive element. The boats were moving, the water was flowing under them, and the audience was walking alongside – creating motion upon motion upon motion, and medium upon medium upon medium. The seduction of the dance was an intensely erotic one, which focused the attention of the viewer despite the huge scale of the surroundings.
The performers created, in their imagination, a figment of what this event meant to them. In reality, the sheer fact of a stage in motion, affected by tide, wind and tow, created a respect for the natural elements that could not have been duplicated in a rehearsal on dry land.
The central figure was the pregnant matriarch Angelica. She was the dominant figure of respect to whom everyone performed. Her fertility and ability to reproduce life was the source of her ability to attract the other performers to her. She had her own personal assistants that followed her everywhere; including a lady trumpet player, who complimented her own musical virtuosity, and her storyteller, the actress Judi Dench in her first operatic performance. For her I wrote a form of metred narrative:
Fleeting Opera, narrative for The Intriguer (Judi Dench)
by Max Couper
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The Stories unfolded fast faster than you can imagine made manifest by the East the West the South and North |
And it was the winds and currents and tides that brought them together and mixed them into the fragments of things that became known as the birthrights Children who were born of the Ionic the Arabic the Cyclopic and the Romanic |
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That were begotten of the mixtures and ingredients that were forgotten to the much-later-on who had them in their every last and Fleeting Gene With memories of the grandmothers and grandfathers who served as the fashions for their living style |
Aboard vessels made of metal floating as tubs of steel sounds of brass wood and wind skin stretched tight over barrels The right to dance and to find the rites of the love and lust that drives them on to the places to enjoy the Un-quenchables |
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And there was dance that owed much to the origins of those long past frenzies of the hips that joined for the future now looking back at the impregnation that gave them their birthright |
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And there was peace provided that the unthinkable unimaginable unpreachable was kept to |
That your lust and my lust approach each other as display of colour emblazoned across your open chest |
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Un-imposed so that only colour etched in movement ever sways the other over into the Vast |
Fleeting Opera 2000
Contemporary Floating Opera for the River Thames Battersea Park 26 July Parliament & South Bank 27 July
by Max Couper
with Trevor Wishart, Sasha Kingston & Tom Sapsford
The Couper Collection with
The Royal Opera,
The Royal Ballet,
The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House,
and Judi Dench
Artists appearing with the kind permission of
The Royal Opera House
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Mezzo-Soprano: Tenor: Baritone: Dancers: Narrator: |
Kate McCarney Nicholas Heath Jonathan Fisher Tom Sapsford Deborah Bull Judi Dench |
Trumpet: Violin: Double Bass: Winchmen: |
Ruth Shaddock Katherine Wilson Tony Hougham Dean Leslie Paul Mitchell |
Concept, Composition, and Direction: Max Couper Composition and Musical direction: Trevor Wishart Choreography: Tom Sapsford
Costume Design: Sasha Kingston
Assistant Director: Dean Leslie
Couper Collection Producers: Dawn Ellis & Carole Tongue
Production Manager: Adrian Bristow
Rig Masters: Christian Calissendorff, Sasha Kingston Stage Managers: Laura Benedict, Kara M. Kinsch (assistant) Tug Skipper: Max Couper, Pete Wilder (assistant)
Barge Skipper: Terry Wilmot
Hands: Veerle Emboo, Charlotte Kingston
Publicity: Maddi Morton, Chris Millard
Photography: Timothy N. Holt, David Graeme-Bater, Gautier DeBlonde Programme Production: The Designers Collective and Christian Calissendorff Video: Sara Nason
Costumes Maker: Tony Wood
Set Fabric Maker: Ian Gray of Lonton & Gray, Burnham-on-Crouch