Project Arts Centre, Dublin
Ian Wilson
– Una Santa Oscura
This was the premiere of an onion piece, a multi-disciplinary composition with layers to peel away revealing different things.
The innermost layer is new and thoughtful music for violin and tape by Belfast-born Ian Wilson. The piece’s main inspiration – and the next layer of the onion – is the eponymous “obscure saint”, Hildegard of Bingen – 12th-century abbess, visionary, composer, scientist, writer, and philosopher. Seven of its 13 short movements have the religious titles “Devotional” and “Visionary”, and three more are called “Interlude”. The remaining three have narrative titles whose connection to the life of Hildegard is alluded to but not spelt out: “Tirade”, “Intense Love”, and “Near Death Experience”.
More layers: first, that this is Hildegard through the filter of Oliver Sacks – doctor, neurologist and author, who suggested in a 1970 collection of case studies called Migraine that her visions were headache-induced – and, second, that this is music theatre. Director Tom Creed and designer Ciarán O’Melia set the wordless action in a spartan bed-sit that resonates with the abbess’s cell.
As the piece opens, the soloist Ioana Petcu-Colan eyes her violin sitting atop the fridge. The tape runs – quiet but not altogether at ease, with electronically manipulated samples, mostly from the violin. She eventually, hesitantly plays an innocent little figure. From that moment all the layers are in train together.
Petcu-Colan is asked to do almost everything and almost nothing. In other words, she alone must carry the whole piece, and yet the staging asks for no great dramatic input. Throughout this spectrum she is commanding, as she is with her instrument, so that the whole, multilayered experience strikes a successful balance between the perplexing and the moving.
