James Kudelka’s ‘Against Nature.’
The Symbolists, in both painting and literature, were typically obsessed with the state of their own minds. It's an obsession that might make a recluse out of anyone. For Jean des Esseintes, the protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysmans's 1884 novel À Rebours (Against Nature), it meant a total retreat into his own brand of experimental decadence.
Director/choreographer James Kudelka, composer James Rolfe and librettist Alex Poch-Goldin have created a compelling and sinister interpretation of the novel. Using two baritones (Alexander Dobson and Geoffrey Sirett), a dancer (Laurence Lemieux), pianist (Steven Philcox), cellist (Carina Reeves) and violinist (Parmela Attariwala), they construct the redemptive story of des Esseintes's shunning of society, his hermetic sojourn in the countryside, then his turning to God and death. It's a polished, often beautiful, production – even if it might feel a little staid.
Rolfe's score is an accomplishment: spare, ominous and atmospheric. It's sung with clarity and sustained feeling by Dobson in the lead role (The Master), who finds the necessary electric mania in his eyes.
Kudelka's choreography is woven in and out of the action with a light and expert touch. Lemieux moves her way assuredly around the others' bodies, using them as strategic support or compelling them to dance with her. She transforms from tortoise to barmaid to Parisian courtesan with physical playfulness and her own twinkling stare.
So why staid? The program notes tell us that À Rebours is allegedly the "poisonous French novel" that corrupts the title character in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. It makes us long for a parallel touch of risk, debauchery and subversion. The Master engages in the kind of cruel aesthetic game-playing that you can imagine on the Instagrams of the world's richest kids: He cultivates a garden of poisonous flowers for the sake of a new perfume. As this happens, gilded jewels and vivid petals unfold on a framed screen upstage. The device creates the effect of a symbolist painting, but it also leaves the stage stuck in a workaday 19th century, indistinguishable from the Paris that The Master's left behind. Rather than articulating the symbolist state of mind through bodies, lighting, choreography, we get the story downstage and the internal world – the mania, the risk, the potential for corruption – at a remove on the screen behind.