Iconnotations
Red Note Ensemble, Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh Fringe
 

PETER MAXWELL DAVIES dices with death and resurrection in Vesalii Icones, his little known composition, that was presented by Red Note Ensemble at Greyfriars Kirk as part of the Edinburgh Festival fringe. It is a musical mash-up of the Passion of Christ and the first illustrated book of human dissection published by the pioneering Italian anatomist Vesalius in 1543.

Maxwell Davies’s touch of genius was to write the presence of a dancer into the score with the instruction to perform in the midst of six musicians “ad libitum,” or “at one’s pleasure.”

The part amounts to one of the greatest challenges available in the repertoire of contemporary dance. The dancer must channel the contradictory impulses that underlie the composition: the sacred and the profane, the violent, the arbitrary and the mystical. He must perform the cruelty with tact and taste.

This requires a mastery of both classical and avant-garde movement that can marry the unexpected chance of Cage with the effortless discipline of Cunningham. It requires an aesthetic sense that can wring the maximum of allusion from the minimal touch of object and costume.

 In Matthew Hawkins the piece finds the creative equal it demands.

At one sudden and shocking moment, and to demonstrate the intention of the music, Hawkins lifts a meat tenderiser above his head and we see the whole of the crucifixion in the single gesture, as well as the brutality of anatomy, the aesthetic of surrealism and the station of the cross.

Maxwell Davies wrote it in 1969, when Rice and Lloyd Webber were writing Jesus Christ Superstar and you feel that both works belong to the same zeitgeist. They are both works of musical theatre that deploy popular and avant-garde means to explore the narrative of Christian faith. The crowd pleasers Rice and Webber leave Christ on the cross, but it takes the gay atheist Maxwell Davies to take you all the way through the resurrection, and to do so persuasively.

For sure it is an “elite” work, and a demanding language, but it stares wide-eyed at the material realities of the finite human body. This is where the postwar avant-garde and its pursuit of the new could create a language that is potentially useful for everyone.

I saw this performance on the evening that our comrade Cliff Cocker, arts editor of the Star, died. I don’t know how to express my feelings about this, but in this experimental and complex exploration of death and its aftermath, that throbs to a Christian pulse, I find a companion, a consolation, and the outlines of an experience which I need, but for which I don’t have the words.

This is a landmark performance of a classic work. Hawkins’s performance accompanied by Red Note Ensemble’s immaculate musical rendition is demanding, exhilarating and touch perfect. It shows you what the Edinburgh festival is for.
 

To view visit: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/iconnotations-2