Rosemary Duffy - Tulp
05 October 2004
Tulp - the body public is a multi-media performance piece. It features a series of recorded interviews conducted by visual artist Justine Cooper, with an extraordinary assemblage of people invited to speak to camera in tight close up about their experiences across a whole range of medical and existential topics. In less capable hands the result could have been yet another wanky, multi-media performance piece but Cooper is indeed an artist and what she shows us on the big screen and what we hear is captivating, unexpected and gob-smackingly honest. At times, given the highly medical, and excruciatingly intimate nature of some of the anecdotes, it was more detail than this weak-stomached reviewer needed, but the device proved to be a highly effective way of exploring the big imponderables - birth, death, dying, the soul, suffering, the nature of illness and what comes after the body ceases to function.
The narratives were punctuated by well-chosen selections of vocal music by Monteverdi, Merula and others. (But next time could a list of the music used please be included in the programme notes.) These pieces were sensitively rendered by Jane Edwards, no mean feat given she was at various times singing while prone or benignly terrorizing the audience with a cunningly-secreted video camera. (It was up her sleeve in case your imagination has run away with you.) I found this aspect of the performance very engaging as the words of the songs were gently complementary to the themes of the narratives.
The instruments – recorders, baroque harp, sackbut, cello, trombone and saxophone – played by the Elision Ensemble – made a less successful contribution to the whole. Call me old-fashioned but I found they added little when they weren’t accompanying the voice in a more-or-less conventional way. Sure, there was novelty in watching Rosanne Hunt 'operate' on her cello with surgical instruments as Genevieve Lacey and Jane Edwards 'sawed' back and forth across its strings with the world’s longest piece of horsehair (suture thread?). But the resulting 'music' (and we use the term very loosely) never amounted to more than wallpaper, albeit perfectly in sync with the overall tenor of the production.
Two latex screens on either side of the central screen provide secondary visual stimulus of beautiful, freaky and fascinating images ranging from pictures of the interior workings of the human body courtesy of modern medical imaging technologies and more arcane anatomical illustrations to distortions of the players hidden behind, and projections of artistically-manipulated calligraphy providing Italian/English translations of the songs. These images were artfully used and added another dimension to the words of both the singer and the interviewees.
On 16 January 1632, the original Tulp – a doctor working in Amsterdam – dissected the executed body of a convicted thief before an audience of the city’s most important burghers. This event inspired Rembrandt to create a work of art entitled The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp. Nearly four centuries later, Tulp’s actions have spawned another work of art, a very 21st-century work of art which continues that very necessary tradition of art prodding us to think about the condition that is the human one.
- Rosemary Duffy
More Information
Tulp
Performed as part of the Brisbane Festival 2004.
Website: http://www.brisbanefestival.com.au/
