Alice has been struck down by a virus and has lost her voice.
We texted each other regularly over the weekend and the reports from her were increasingly painful. She felt she was sickening on Friday and I dosed her up with potions: vitamin C, aconite, pro-biotics to help her system recover from her last dose of antibiotics which she was prescribed for another virus just before rehearsals began; and whilst my attempts to take care of her were appreciated, they don’t seem to have worked.
In these circumstances the fragility of the human body is all too evident.
For Alice it is unbearable: she is in pain, the very core of her being and her work is wounded, albeit temporarily, and she is missing not only the first stagger through of the Acts in continuity in the studio, but also the sitzprobes (first rehearsals with the orchestra).
From my point of view, I am bereft.
The Carmen we have been developing together is absent – when we tried to run Act 2 yesterday, the core of it – a long duet between Carmen and Don Jose – was missing. Julian is also ill, but it seems less seriously. During the rehearsal period one soloist after another has been struck down: we have never had a full contingent.
My task, to create a complete vision of the opera that is coherent, makes narrative sense, with images and staging that frame and support or act in counterpoint to the central relationship, remains impossible, and may well do so until the very last minute.
Live work is created in rehearsal and it is during the latter stages of the process of any piece of work – theatre or film – that it is refined, edited, pushed, and lifted – hopefully – towards its true potential. How much of this directorial muscle I will now be able to exercise remains unclear to me.
My philosophy when such disasters occur when making a film (for they always do – they just take different forms) is to adopt the point of view that they arrive as a gift – an opportunity to do something unexpected.
Perhaps the deep empathetic sadness and frustration I am feeling for Alice – such an extraordinary artist, painfully robbed of her glorious instrument, will drive me to ever greater depths of empathy with Carmen herself. As rehearsals have progressed I have found myself hotly defensive of Carmen as a character – a woman so repeatedly misunderstood in production after production – her power perceived as malevolent and arbritary, her otherness and desire for freedom portrayed as wilful, her death, finally, a punishment for being so alive.
The absence of Alice in rehearsal is like imagining a world without Carmen; life without a flame.
