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Too many cooks, they say, spoil the broth. That seems to be the problem with The Nine Jewelled Deer, given its sweltering world premiere at Luma Arles (as part of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence).
Composer Sivan Eldar, singer and writer Ganavya Doraiswamy, visual artist Julie Mehretu, writer Lauren Groff, singer Aruna Sairam and an instrumental ensemble have teamed up to reflect upon an ancient Buddhist fable. But the most meddlesome cook is director Peter Sellars, whose good-faith cultural appropriations grow a little more extravagant in their claims to spiritual enlightenment every year.
An enchanted deer (footnote from the programme book: “The creators of the opera use the gender-neutral term deer — as opposed to stag or doe — in order to subvert traditional gender roles”) saves a drowning man, who will later betray the animal. When the King’s hunters arrive, it responds with gentle compassion. Violence is magically dissipated by empathy — which, as we all know, always works in real life.
The creators developed the work at a series of exotic residencies in Italy, France and Los Angeles. Doraiswamy inspired her peers with improvised recreations of her grandmother’s “kitchen orchestra”, in which the matriarch encouraged fellow women to sublimate the trauma of abuse through song and improvised percussion. The danger with every intercultural musical collaboration is that complexity is reduced to the lowest-common-denominator pursuit of common ground; these typically reductive compromises dominate Eldar’s score, too. Doraiswamy encourages the audience to sing along; “participatory” and “immersive” are wonderful words for grant applications.
Had the performance venue not been suffocatingly hot, had the bar beforehand not run out of food, had the show only lasted the advertised 90 minutes instead of an interminable two hours, had Sellars tried a little less hard to make us all better people, the whole might not have been so irritating. In fact, his staging was so minimalist that it was more like watching an open workshop, or attending a performative meditation.
The musicians played with courage and — especially in the case of saxophonist Hayden Chisholm and percussionist Rajna Swaminathan — virtuosity. Doraiswamy is a charismatic performer and a magnificent singer. Intercultural exchange is a fine thing, and there’s nothing wrong with improvisatory collaboration. But let’s not call it opera, or raise expectations of a dramaturgically coherent work of music theatre.
If you like the idea of a long, steamy interfaith ceremony with a largely consonant soundtrack, head to Arles. But eat beforehand.
★★☆☆☆
To July 9, then at Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, Aix-en-Provence, to July 16, festival-aix.com
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