The character was thrillingly danced by Silvennoinen, beginning with a breathtaking, gravity-defying Peking-opera tour-de-force that morphed into a tentative exploration of reality as s/he faded away. The enigmatic, mesmeric Mima (who appeared in Movement 6) is a futuristic artificial intelligence, a robot with a soul. They spoke alternately in Finnish and English-sometimes monologues, sometimes in iambic pentameter, sometimes in blank verse-often hauntingly echoing Maggio’s sung passages, especially evocative in Movement 10, “Lamentation,” the work’s musical centerpiece. The singers entered in silence to the sound of their breathing, after which they sung Maggio’s elegiac “Relief to Forget.” In the adaptation’s prologue and epilogue-and throughout the evening-accomplished Finnish actors Carl Alm (The Narrator) and Matti Raita (Mimaroben, the ship’s engineer) served as guides. Henriksson is artistic director of the Finnish theatre Klockrike, a nomadic troupe whose motto is the Nobel comment about Martinson. The ship’s 8,000 passengers (the 16 singers of The Crossing) vacillate between hope and grief, seeking first answers to their plight and then comfort as their fate becomes clear.Ī complex artistic undertaking, Aniara had a number of creative partners: Donald Nally (The Crossing’s always-voyaging artistic director, who here conducted four instrumentalists as well as the choir) Robert Maggio (West Chester University’s well-known composer and theatrical collaborator who wrote the music) Antti Silvennoinen of Wusheng Company (a Peking Opera troupe from Helsinki, Finland) and stage director/librettist Dan Henriksson. But an accident veers it off course, heading eternally into the void. After leaving a dying Earth (here called Maa), the massive golonder (space ship) Aniara seeks a new universe. That’s a perfect description of this 17-movement adaptation, which ranges from the cosmic into the intimacy of loss and grief.
Martinson was awarded a Nobel Prize (1974) for “writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos.”
Written in 1956, Aniara has been twice translated into English (once by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid), adapted into a 1959 electronic opera by Karl-Birger Blomdahl, and made into a 1960 Swedish film. This world premiere is based on Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space, the 103-canto epic poem by celebrated prolific Swedish author Harry Martinson (1904-1978). It's apt for a work that (like Old City) merges past and present, facing the future. It was shoehorned into the fourth-floor space of Christ Church Neighborhood House, which the audience entered via alley-like North American Street behind the church’s graveyard. This 90-minute work of performance art (what The Crossing calls “choral theatre”) is the tale of a voyaging vessel and its passengers traveling into infinity.
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