The newspaper "Information" November 4, 2004
Scurvy with Bel Canto
Sejer Andersen lends gangrenous body to beautiful death poem about Vitus Bering.
By Anne Middelboe Christensen.
Gangrene has taken his legs - and scurvy has taken the rest. So as he sits there, buried in his hole on the beach to keep warm, he has only got the stars to talk to. And the blue foxes, of course, who are hoping to find real bodies, not just half dead ones…
The painful, mortal putrefaction which overtook Vitus Bering in 1741, is the starting-point of Gregers Dirkinck-Holmfeld's dramatic solo And here one is lying like some other idiot… The actor Sejer Andersen plays the 60 years old Vitus Bering in a tremendous, self-constituted tour play - with cadaverous hands and frost chapped cheeks and male stomach cramps with hardened macho pains in the corners of his mouth. He emerges from the snow covered sand with the angry upper part of his body and with his anxiety; here even a wolfskin coat will not protect you from the death gale.
Magical Music
The internal storm mixes with the sound of Bo Holten's magical music - a kind of a requiem arranged for bathing jetty-memories...the notes follow Bering's nightmares and his wish-dreams. He finds the constellations, one after the other while the female voices find the notes, one after the other in little, cheerful ah's. Until the men "bass in" with darker milky ways in more distant keys.
Down-to-earth words
It is a remarkably beautiful fusion of tones and words - against Lin Utzon's drafts of an enervate Bering. Strangely enough his last agony is very soothing. And Musica Ficta's 9 singers sing with an angelic purity and weightlessness which envelops Sejer Andersen's buried desperation protectively. What could one call it? Perhaps a musical death poem. But, anyway, it is a spell-binding and poetic bel canto on an international level about one of Danish history's toughest men. This Bering belches out with down-to-earth words about being afraid, and with political taunts about the Zar's insanity. And he whispers soft words about his Anna, too…
From his own island at the end of the world he dreams himself back to her and to the church bells at Horsens Fjord (where he had his childhood). But, as the world conqueror admits about the isles of Alroe and Hjarnoe out there in the horizon: "I have never been so far out."
"And here one is lying like some other idiot..." by Gregers Dirckinck-Holmfeldt.
Composer and conductor: Bo Holten,
Choir: Musica Ficta.
Scenic concept and actor: Sejer Andersen. Direction: Thomas Bendixen.
Performed in Lyngby Kulturhus. On the road.
