MEDIATHEK

The Temptation of St Antony is a multimedia ballet-chante, scored for six physical actors, six orchestral musicians and a heap of outdated technological equipment. This operatic adaptation of Flaubert’s unstageable play, premiered in a labyrinthine warehouse in downtown Los Angeles to critical acclaim in early 2015. The LOS ANGELES TIMES heralded this “seriously imaginative, theologically post-apocalyptic, gravely yet wondrously immersive new show” as a ‘Critic’s Pick’ at “the intersection of theater, music, visual art and dance.”

Flaubert’s play, a psychedelic history of religious thought, was described by Foucault as a ‘fantasia of the library.’ Flaubert, a notoriously compulsive perfectionist, labored over the text for twenty-five years, emulating the discipline of his hermetic protagonist. It is considered a heavily coded autobiography, incorporating his personal traumas and obsessions, his anxieties about advancing technology, and his equal disdain and admiration for religious practice. Four Larks experimental adaptation blurs the boundary between author and subject, creating an “eerily musicalized allegory of the frenzied imagination in the throes of creation.” The central character is deliberately undefined. We see him seated at a typewriter, repeatedly chronicling a phantasmagoric night in the life of disillusioned St Antony. He writes in the third person, but responds to the narrative in the first. As Antony’s visions become increasingly immersive, he is absorbed into the action, but maintains a critical distance. The musical and visual aesthetic further complicates this instability, juxtaposing Antony’s 3rd Century Egypt and Flaubert’s industrial age Europe, with contemporary equipment and technology. Flaubert’s original text similarly spirals through space and time as Antony navigates an intertextual maze tracing humankind's’ endlessly evolving struggle to articulate the indefinable. This metatheatrical adaptation captures the ecstatic liminality of Flaubert’s unstageable play through a postmodern lens.