Charles Darwin, but not quite as we know him

A Danish electro-opera on the life of an evolutionary scientist? It’s a lot better than it sounds, says Pádraic Killeen

DARWINIAN theory and electro-opera are terms that might never have come to share the same sentence. Yet here they are, thanks to the intervention of Danish art collective Hotel Pro Forma. Hotel Pro Forma’s lavish theatre piece Tomorrow, In A Year has been earning plaudits since its 2009 debut.

According to Ralf Richardt Strøbech, co-artistic director with Hotel Pro Forma, the concept behind the show is a simple one. “It’s about revealing the extraordinary beauty that there is in Darwinian thought. That is our very basic ambition,” he says.

To capture the grandeur that Darwin saw everywhere, Strøbech and co-director Kirsten Dehlholm collaborated with Swedish electronica outfit The Knife and Japanese choreographer Hiroaki Umeda, amongst others, to produce a pageant of light, colour, music, song and dance. The result is an opera that eschews a conventional narrative account of Darwin’s life and opts instead for a vivid lyricism rooted in sensory experience.

“There is progression, in the sense that it vaguely traces the course of Charles Darwin’s life,” says Strøbech. “But it does so in a very generic sense, because his life takes the same course as everybody else’s in the Homo sapiens species.

“So the first part of the show is about youth, and the tendency in youth to want to explore. It’s about Darwin’s travels. The second is about his having a family and setting up home somewhere — which is also true for virtually everyone. It’s what Richard Dawkins would call ‘genotypical behaviour’: everyone in our species does it. The next part is about succeeding in professional life with Darwin’s publication of On The Origin Of Species. Finally, the last part is about reclusion and becoming older and leaving the stage to somebody else.

“So it does trace a path but it’s not a narrative. It’s more a set of meditations or poetic renditions of these stages and states of mind.”

Strøbech is a rather fascinating character. Sitting in a chic Dublin bar, he radiates an insistent and disarming positivity.

“The world is brilliantly capable of producing a lot of bad things in its own right, so I have absolutely no need to further illustrate that,” he says. “I would much rather focus on the grandeur of the world — on the growing and the diversity and interconnectedness of everything.”

Appropriately, the production of Tomorrow, In A Year came together via the forces that emerged in collaboration. The Knife’s Olof and Karin Dreijer, in particular, have contributed a great deal to the production, as evidenced in a remarkable album of music from the show.

To achieve a singular soundscape, Olof Dreijer visited the Amazon and Iceland to record sounds. The results are surprisingly organic. Moreover, they are invigorating in the way they revitalise one’s aural senses to the wonder of repetition, intermittency, and harmony at work every day in our natural environments.

“The thing about electronica is that it’s world-building,” says Strøbech. “It’s about creating an atmosphere that is saturated in a specific perception of this world. So you can absolutely hear that Olof went to those places by virtue of the very specific sounds that he was able to produce as a result. Before he went there we spoke a lot about how it would not be about his just recording a bird. It was also about figuring out how a stone releases sound, or how prehistoric magma conveys sound. It was a search for the things that you can hear in nature on a big scale.” The results, he says, reek of “nature that is huge and incomprehensibly complex”.

Strøbech is educated in architecture, music and film, and is adamant that the conventional division between the arts is misleading.

“I almost never think about the form of what I’m doing,” he says. “For me, studying architecture or film or music is just studying different means of expression and gaining knowledge. Then you can put these different aspects into play as tools. They are means, not ends.”

No doubt Darwin would have concurred.

- Tomorrow, In A Year plays at Cork Opera House on Friday and Saturday www.corkmidsummer.com

Picture: A scene from Tomorrow, In A Year at Cork Opera House on Friday and Saturday: a pageant of light, colour, music, song and dance vaguely based on the life of Charles Darwin.