Visual artist Dorothy Cross is staging an opera in the Slate Quarry Grotto on Valentia Island. She talks to Arminta Wallace about this ambitious project
Each component, taken on its own, sounds perfectly plausible: it's only when you put them together that you begin to wonder whether you can have heard correctly. Opera Theatre Company. Pergolesi. Stabat Mater. Giant screen. Dorothy Cross. Valentia Island. Slate quarry.
Yup: slate quarry. Not the sort of place you'd expect to find top-notch opera singers giving a live performance of one of the masterpieces of 18th-century religious music, in the company of video projections by one of the country's leading visual artists, perhaps? But for the artist Dorothy Cross, who dreamed up the idea, the vast cave at the back of Valentia Island's Slate Quarry Grotto is as dramatic - not to say operatic - a performance space as you're ever likely to encounter.
"It's like a Wagner set," she says. "You'd think a whole team of designers ran around for 10 weeks trying to construct it. It's better than anything I've ever seen in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York - and it's all just there. There are giant machines. There are boats. There are slices of steel. There are bits of wood that have probably been there for a hundred years, and pools of water that we lit from underneath. It's incredibly beautiful."
Cross first encountered the cave when she was working on the island with her scientist brother. "We were making a film about jellyfish," she says. "It was based on the life of a woman called Maude Delap who lived on Valentia and was an amateur naturalist."
The film, which combines images of the island with Tom Cross's research on a lethal stinging jellyfish from Australia, was screened last spring in the little church at Knightstown, where Delap's father had been a Church of Ireland minister. "When you go down there, everywhere you see signs which say 'The Grotto'," says Cross. "And as soon as I saw it, I knew we had to do something there."
Cross has been involved in a number of sculptural and multi-media projects - most notably, perhaps, the Ghost Ship (end itals) which "haunted" Dun Laoghaire harbour in 1999 - which have made her name widely known outside the immediate world of the visual arts. This is not her first venture into operatic territory. She created a set design for Opera Theatre Company's production of Handel's Tamerlano a decade ago; and in 1999 a collaboration with the Project Arts Centre saw her mount a piece called Chiasm in a pair of handball alleys in Galway.
"It involved two singers and a projection down into the floor of these beautiful alleys, which are very simple architectural spaces," she says. "I took 10 romantic operas and gleaned little fragments from each about extreme love, and extreme loss. Chiasm is a physiological term for the overlapping of images. We had a singer in each alley, with the same image overlapped on the floors."
When she saw the cave, she immediately thought of staging Monteverdi's opera Orfeo there "because it was like a giant hole into the underworld". At the time she didn't, she adds ruefully, know about the giant orchestral forces required by that particular opera. "But the Stabat Mater is perfect. Two singers, nine players. And the grotto is itself a shrine to the Virgin Mary; I've seen photographs of hundreds of people up there in their headscarves and good shoes, going to Mass."
At the turn of the last century, slate from Valentia was highly prized all over Europe - and beyond. The roof of Charing Cross Station in London is made from it, as is that of San Salvador station in El Salvador. After many years of dereliction, the quarry was reopened by a group of local people, and slate is once again being produced there. Great for Valentia; not so good, perhaps, for the singers who are to perform the Pergolesi in its dark, damp depths. According to Cross, however, the singers in question - the counter-tenor Jonathan Peter Kenny and the soprano Lynda Lee, experienced baroque interpreters both - are remarkably sanguine about the whole adventure, as are the orchestral musicians, the Irish Baroque Orchestra, and conductor Mark Duley.
As for the giant screen and Cross's images, baroque purists needn't worry, she says. "It's not going to be a big, snazzy hi-tech background. The music will be sung without video."
And the images themselves? "I'll be able to tell you the morning after what it's going to be like," she says. "But the idea is that the big screen will move on a track from the back of the cave and block it, almost like a giant screensaver. Then what you'll have is images of the industry, very beautifully shot by a woman called Belinda Parsons from England. Very, very close-up images of all these guys working the machines, and the beautiful repeated rhythmic patterns of working and polishing the stone."
The performance will tap into the cave's history and its resonances of hard work, nature, neglect and religion. "Someone asked me the other day, is this aimed at a resurrection of the religious aim of the shrine," says Cross, "and I said 'no'. In some ways it's about neutral territory that has the glimmer of memory of religion. The one thing I learned from listening to the Stabat Mater is that it's a real attempt to regain passion. They're singing about this incredibly, extremely brutal scene of the dead son and the mother; the music goes into a kind of frenzy, but has a beautiful calmness, too. So it's not so much about religious passion - it's about any passion. Passion for art, as well. Passion for anything that isn't just some kind of placebo. In 2004, everything seems less passionate a lot of the time."
When the singers emerge out of the cave, Cross says, it will create uncertainty as to why such exquisite music is happening in such an extraordinary place; which, in the end, is not so different to what she normally does as an artist.
"I take disparate things and put them together to try and shift ideas. It's just a bigger, and possibly more awkward, way of doing what I might do in a gallery. People these days talk about art in terms of selling, and how much paintings are worth, and it's so awful. But the idea of bursting into beauty from something that looks mundane - that, I think, is the role of art."
Opera Theatre Company's Stabat Mater is at the Slate Quarry Grotto on Valentia Island on August 19th, 20th and 21st