Sydney

There’s something rather intimate about being invited to a dress rehearsal of a show. The creatives are milling around you buzzing in nervous excitement. The show is still in bits and pieces on the floor, not yet solid. The world they’ve created is in its teenagehood — not infant in its conceptualism, but not yet fully grown. You feel much like a wildlife photographer, sitting, observing, noticing, but still distinctly on the outside; our presence as critics is both cruelly invasive and fundamentally necessary. In The Presence of Light was my first dress rehearsal invitation, and it offered me entirely new parts of the critic’s experience. Principally, I got to feel how the show was actively coming together around me, and I got to ask a little about what I was walking into.

Spark Sanders-Robinson, creative-lead and the only live speaking (and singing) voice says, when I confess to her I have no experience writing for opera, that this experience is “opera for the uninformed” — that is, it is an operatic experience for those who don’t want to be spoken down to, but instead connected with. She tells me the experience is a deliberation of love, an exploration of what it is in its truest form, instead it being trapped within the bonds of the human experience.

“It’s about death,” she says, then, when Mia Rashid, their dancer prompts, “is it about death?” she responds, “no. It’s about love.” I am, admittedly, prepared for the experience to be completely incomprehensible after this conversation. I have never been so glad to be proven right.

We are tucked into the M2 Gallery in Surry Hills — an itty bitty space, unconventional, echoey, with what almost looks like a frame surrounding the elevated platform this team is using as a stage. The “stage” is bare, ‘cept for a white sheet at the back. Robinson wears a flowy, airy, blue wrap dress — which, with Rashid’s simple white tulle, almost shapeless dress, creates an eerie dreamlike atmosphere, allowing them to become one with the space around them. The space itself is generally unsupportive, and I look up to the ceiling to see what they will do with lighting, because there’s certainly no view-blocking from-home lights milling about. On the floor, there sits a singular projector, surrounded by indistinguishable frames I don’t yet understand. Nathaniel Kong joins us in the room, sits behind the piano.

I ask, upon finding out that Robinson and Rashid will be the only two interacting on stage: “is it a two-hander?” Robinson responds, “kinda a two-hander. Unless you count the piano as a third character.”

We begin.

Recorded responses from what must be over ten or fifteen people fill the room with their overlapping responses, talking about what it is that they love. Although each answer is interesting and beautiful, we cannot catch a single one as they become jumbled and chaotic. Robinson takes the stage and the glow of her projector light snaps on as she begins to talk to the audience (me and their photographer, mind you) about what she defines as love. Or rather, how difficult she finds love to define. She leaves us on a rumination about the use of defining it at all, and the lights go out. Rashid replaces her on stage, taking us through the first of many classical pieces of music in the show. Her movements are wide and grounded, translating the impossible hugeness of love, what it is as a force of nature. Then, as she connects to its fragility and its grief, they go miniscule and wineglass-thin in turn.

Robinson is generally well-known for her use and manipulation of light, no different in this production. Indeed, what makes this light work so interesting across Robinson’s catalogue is the matter in which it interacts with itself, as well as the people on stage. As Rashid becomes something more human, she catches and releases the light in her hand, and love goes from being something that possesses and consumes her, to something akin to hope, a slight glimmer. Different frames of colour over the projector take us from softer yellows, to bright, high-contrast whites that throw sharp, dangerous shadows behind Robinson. Then, as our dancer rejoins us, she is bathed in a pink light that makes her almost inhuman. It is at this moment I understand the deliberation about the piano. Kong and Rashid seem to not just legitimately communicate, but have entire conversations through the call and response of music and dance. Later, when Robinson’s mezzo-soprano rings out through the almost-empty room, I remember this relationship in its more traditional form as the opera and the orchestra interact, representing entire sections through these two individuals.

As a production, I cannot tell you that there was an overlapping narrative to this piece. Rather, it functioned as a series of images, more performance art or a film sequence than a piece of theatre. In one moment, shadow puppets creep over the projector, two faces in profile, then meet in the middle for a kiss. Rashid collapses in between them, bathed in, yet shadowed by their love. To that point, the piece doesn’t attempt to ask or answer something, it invites you to feel the full scope of an emotive experience in all its beauty and wickedness. The performers are all viscerally facing something through their chosen art form, and the size of the space as well as the passion of their performances makes the whole experience incredibly intimate. In Rashid’s rare moments of pause, we can hear the heaving of her breath. In between Robinson’s clear notes, we can feel the sound still bouncing around the room. The body-ness of it all provides us with the raw erotic lens of their conversation.

In a technique I’ve certainly never seen before, a glass bowl is placed over the projector, and Robinson and Rashid take turns dripping water, oil, and ink into it, throwing curling and whispering colour across the stage, bleeding and changing the light. As both performers are in white or almost-white, these moments of colours stain not just the background, but them as well. In one particularly effective moment, an explosion of purples appear across Robinson’s body on stage, as ink is dripped into the centre of the bowl.

In many ways, our fourth character is the continued reappearance of the voices. Although jumbled and confusing through the beginning, they spread out and become clearer. We listen to them talk about their lived experience of love, of grief, of heartbreak, of redemption, of life. This tether of realism affirms the path of images we tiptoe through, as well as providing an edge of human vulnerability to the piece that can sometimes escape a performer.

Although I was invited to the dress rehearsal, I must briefly play the part of the wicked critic and remind the world that no art can be perfect. Indeed, the performance as a whole was brilliant, and my only moments of nitpicking are as follows. Robinson, despite being an incredible mezzo-soprano and having strong monologues, has moments of struggling to sit in her body and relaxing. This, when compared with how viscerally one must be in their body as a dancer, is thrown into rather sharp contrast next to Rashid. Further, each of the three performers had moments of sneaking worried glances at one another, which although can be understood as working through the anxieties and uncertainties of dress rehearsal, manifested as drops in concentration through the show. However, other than this, I truly cannot fault anything else. The light work was inspired and beautifully done; Robinson’s performance both as an actor and a singer was beautiful;, Rashid took my breath away as a dancer; and Kong brought old music to new light through his work on the piano. The last moments of the show, a Joni Mitchell cover, floated through the more conceptual work of the rest of the piece and touched base with the audience, giving us a tether to hold onto even as the stage swan with an iris of pink spinning light.

In a topic so broad and difficult to fathom such as love, sometimes connecting to the conceptual and visual serves the explorative process more than the grounded and naturalistic ever could. In The Presence of Light shows its audience that the emotional experience is not a logical one, but a visual and physical one, and if we can embrace letting go of our need to understand, we, ironically, come much closer to knowing what that emotion truly is. The team, in this tucked away gallery, have in a way presented something that matched my early anxieties of being incomprehensible. But then, can’t we say the same thing about love itself?

To book tickets to In The Presence of Light , please visit https://www.lightsontheatre.com/.

Photographer: Samuel Herriman

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