DIVE adapted by Richard Sanger from a story by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, score by Nik Beeson, directed by Alex Fallis, with Fides Krucker, Matthew Gouveia and Earl Pastko. Presented by Mermaid Collective at Array Space (155 Walnut). Preview Thursday (July 30), opens Friday (July 31) and runs to August 9, Tuesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinee Sunday 2 pm. $30, preview $15, August 6 gala $55. dive.bpt.me.
There’s a lot more to the mermaid legend than Disney’s Ariel, star of The Little Mermaid.
A group of artists called The Mermaid Collective investigate a different and much more sensual side of watery women in Dive, a blend of theatre and music adapted from Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s story The Professor And The Siren.
“Richard [Sanger] approached me as early as 2006 with an idea for the piece,” says singer Fides Krucker, who’s part of the collective along with composer Nik Beeson and director Alex Fallis.
“The idea lay dormant for a while since I didn’t know who could write music with the kind of flexibility I thought the story needed. Then I met Nik and realized he could handle the idea of water in music in a beautiful way.”
In its theatrical form, the tale, set in 1938 Italy, is a three-hander in which a young journalist (Matthew Gouveia) befriends an older man, a respected scholar and senator (Earl Pastko). As their relationship grows, the scholar recounts his encounter with a mermaid decades earlier, when he was the age of the journalist.
“The mermaid in the tale, Lighea, is neither domesticated nor socialized,” smiles Krucker, who plays the role as well as the other women in the show. “She’s a perfect vehicle for me to explore what interests me in my writing and vocal work: to discover whether there’s something I call the unmediated female voice, one that doesn’t appear in reaction or response to the world around her but emerges from her own wants and needs.
“The show grew just as my thinking about that voice was shifting, and the two influenced each other.”
During the past decade and more, Krucker has been moving into vocal work that stretches way beyond what she terms “the socially acceptable beauty of bel canto [beautiful song] music.”
Some of the notes she produces are intentionally raw and growling.
“Maybe I was working toward that female voice with the transgressive sounds I make, but in the past they were more in reaction to a situation. Here sadness and happiness partner with anger and aggression to create what I think of as a more democratic sound with a wider palette. I’m not stuck down a vocal cul-de-sac.”
When the prof first meets the mermaid, she offers him a life with her but, says Krucker, he can’t accept his own feminine side and she leaves, content to live her own narrative. Things change by the end of the tale.
The singer got some surprising inspiration for Lighea while watching women’s basketball during the Pan Am Games.
“Here were all those young women focused just on the game. They were free and connected to each other in teamwork, not reacting to anything else around them. They epitomized a pure innocence, just living for themselves.”
Krucker describes Beeson’s music as a combination of “ambient sounds of Mussolini, jackboots, World War II, flamenco guitar and the sea, the mermaid’s domain.
“When we get to the heart of the piece, viewers hear more complex, orchestral sounds that draw on electro-acoustic music in terms of density and the malleability of those sounds, which don’t suggest that they’re written in bars or with time signatures. Wolves and whales are also part of this wild soundscape.”
So, too, is a text that includes ancient Greek, some of which Krucker sings.
“We had an expert suggest to us how the words might sound. The way they hang together lends itself to declamation or larger-than-life language, with big, juicy vowels and squishy consonants.
“It’s very tasty for my voice, somewhere between Italian and Russian in the way it feels to sing and say.”
To make the experience more personal, the company performs in the small and intimate Array Space.
“Our voices don’t have to be miked, and the audience almost gets to be sitting inside the action. It’ll be like they’re eavesdropping rather than looking through the fourth wall.”
jonkap@nowtoronto.com
