From Rapture Study
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Erlton Church
Thursday, March 20 - Saturday, March 29
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“It's like when you're a child, or watching a child playing with little action figures or dolls,” says Jennie Esdale, creator of Green Fools' new production, Rapture Study in Seven songs. “In that, there is absolute transcendence for the child, when they're actually creating another world. All of the puppets in this piece are strange dolls I've found in Goodwills or Salvation Armies and so on. We've taken those dolls and turned them into puppets. It does connect back to that childhood idea of being taken away by play and imagination.”
Despite its abstract tone, Rapture is a very descriptive title. The piece is a musical, designed around seven ways of inducing rapture — a feeling of sublime euphoria or transcendence — in a person. Seven individual stories revolving around sex, drugs, love, art, fever, nitrogen narcosis and God were developed by seven different composers. Each piece will then be performed by a single actor and, of course, many horrid dolls.
“What happened was that I picked those seven ways of inducing rapture and then I picked seven musicians,” says Esdale. “They all picked their top three, and almost everyone got their top pick. Then they went off without much information from me and without talking to each other and composed their piece to represent their rapture.”
Though the gateways into rapture that Esdale presents may be typical of high-concept theatre, the imagery she creates for each scene is anything but conventional. In the story about nitrogen narcosis, a man is accidentally sucked down the drain in his bathtub. He then travels through multifarious environs, accosted by mermaids, sea life and, eventually, the SS Andrea Doria — a famous deep-sea wreck where divers often attempt to retrieve tea cups as a right of passage.
“The music is written by David Rhymer, and it's a fairly epic piece that comes in several parts musically — it has a lot of water sound and a lot of piano,” says Esdale. “Nitrogen narcosis — Jacques Cousteau coined a phrase, ‘rapture of the deep.’ It's an experience that deep-sea divers have when they go too far and too much nitrogen enters their bloodstream and they experience a state of euphoria — almost like a kind of drunkenness. Many divers who get it die from taking off their masks. The reason that one was picked is because Cousteau gave it that name, and it became an interesting means to tell a story, which I think is the framework for this piece.”
Though the vignettes run the transcendental gamut from the deep-sea adventures of the unfortunate bather to sex being represented in a Parisian puppet brothel, they're all tied together by a recurring scene with Esdale and a Brobdingnagian record collection. Esdale says she thinks of music as one of the purest forms of communication available to us, and therefore one of the fastest ways to the rapture Seven Songs explores. More than any opinion or observation of the topic, this motif underpins the show.
“I'm not sure if what we're presenting has a question that we answer,” says Esdale. “I think what we're presenting is an exploration in a new and interesting way. Part of the thing about rapture is that in order to see light brightly — as your ultimate moment shines — is to be surrounded by darkness. There's a lot of imagery in the piece surrounding that. A lot of shadows and humour, but I don't know yet if we answer a question — and I don't know if we need to.”
