All the ingredients of an incredible production, a little too much ambition. Perhaps less really is more.
Clorinda the Warrior, or Clorinda Agonistes is a combination of dance, opera, live and recorded music, and cinematography. It is ambitious to say the least.
The production is a tale in two parts, exploring conflict in the Middle East, both far back in the past and in the present day. Shobana Jeyasingh, artistic director both of this production and her self-named dance company, draws inspiration from Claudio Monteverdi’s 1624 II Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, which tells the story of the final battle of Clorinda (Jemima Brown), a Muslim female warrior, and her opposer Tancredi (Jonathan Goddard), a Christian crusader. The performance kicks off as the dancers go through the stages of battle. The choreography mirrors a brutal fight, with attacks, blocks, lifts, lunges and falls. It is a passionate and expressive duet. But although the sequences are undeniably impressive and both Brown and Goddard show incredible skill, the poise and pointed toes detract somewhat from the overall effect, and the dance never quite mirrors the true sense of violence and danger that one might think the story demands. The choreography also becomes quite repetitive, and perhaps would have been more effective if only a few minutes shorter. The time when I thought ‘how are they both alive having taken this many (should-be-fatal) blows?’ came and went long before the fatal finale of this act.
Back to the story – a story which I must admit was difficult to gather from the performance itself, and I only fully understood thanks to the very detailed synopsis in the programme. I can’t help but feel disappointed by the narrative. Clorinda and Tancredi battle each other, Tancredi unaware that the masked Clorinda is the woman he has fallen in love with across enemy lines. Tancredi, victorious, slays Clorinda at last. Her final wish is for water so that she may be baptised. Stories about female warriors, even today, are few and far between. One might argue that Clorinda’s decision to abandon her people and her religion at the point of death detracts from any valuable political commentary this production might make about the states of conflicts that are still continuing in the Middle East today, instead portraying a favour for Christian, western values. This final moment in death diminishes any sense of true fight for religious and cultural freedom that Clorinda originally represented.
The entirety of this first act is accompanied by an impressive on-stage string quartet, and tenor opera singer Ed Lyon, who takes on the role of narrator, singing all parts of Monteverdi’s story. Lyon strides about the stage wielding his impressive voice like a weapon. At times Lyon immerses himself in the choreography, a bizarre choice from the director which interrupted the flow of the dance and seemed clunky. Rather than telling the story it was as though Lyon was constantly interrupting it. Punctuated by the muffled noises of mics experiencing technical difficulties, the desired effect of the musical accompaniment fell flat.
In the second act we are transported to a modern day war-torn Middle East. Four almost-identically-dressed female dancers (Jemima Brown, Emily Thompson-Smith, Harriet Waghorn and Ellen Yilma) now represent the spirit of Clorinda, twisting and turning beneath projections of destroyed, war torn unidentified cities (video design by Yeast Culture). The accompaniment moves from live opera and strings to Kareen Roustom’s pre-recorded music, a gritty, hard-hitting composition which transitions into an emotional, gripping lament. The dancing is emotional, expressive, and, at times, truly hard-hitting. The talent of the dancers must be commended, I must say I envy anyone who can move with such impressive control and rhythm. But with regards to the story, for the most part the women seem to be more passive victims of war rather than defiant warriors, and the fighting spirit of Clorinda is absent. With no opponent to fight, the women flee and stumble, falling upon each other, clutching each other, collapsing. They lack the defiance and power which I so hoped to see, and the movements, albeit skilful and impressive to watch, seem almost aimless. Goddard and Lyon return to the stage as a camera man and boom operator, a jarring addition which doesn’t fit with the context of the narrative.
Clorinda the Warrior has all the ingredients of an incredible production, but something somewhere has gone awry, and the final product is lacklustre and falls short of its objective. It seems desperate to make a statement about women at war, but what is that statement? It is simply too confusing to tell.