Marathons - culture - opera - stamina

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I have some experience with marathons.

Picture me at 14 wearing sky blue stretch shorts, a white cotton knitted sleeveless jumper (now known as a tank top) that had a perfectly matching inch wide blue stripe across the chest and above the waistband (I know the details because I knitted it) short cotton socks (white of course - colours were not manufactured for girls yet) and white sandshoes (leather and vinyl trainers were not yet invented) walking/jogging the 20 mile Marymead marathon (to raise funds for the children who lived in its institution) around the lake and up the hillsides of Canberra. My friend Leggs (hers were unusually long for the time) and I were delighted to be in the top thirty women to finish. I was proud to earn $40 for the institution for a half day physical effort (so long as my 40 sponsors paid up). I was proud to make so much money in the time. We raised money for Marymead each year until I finished school.

Marathons happened at school. Mainly in athletics. I was a sprinter so its was only two or three times I took on an 'Olympic' marathon. Just as well we had monitors to count how many times I walked, jogged, stilled around the school oval to get the distance. It was a lot of circuits! It also felt like a marathon training for Bronze medals in life saving and having to swim fully clad with backpack (canvas old style) up and down a swimming pool. Not the same distance but required more physicality from me. Times have changed because last Sunday my friend Ange walked her 5km marathon in Melbourne for the first time in her late forties.

Other physical marathon type activities (4 consecutive days or more) relate to scuba diving from boats over coral in the Great Barrier Reef and bushwalking in Kakadu and other national parks. These were planned holidays with camping or caravaning in between strenuous daytime activities.

It’s not accurate to think of physical marathons as not having cultural aspects. Indeed in most national parks there are interpretive exhibitions and explanations of original inhabitants (in Australia often informative and shaming of our settlers’ views of first nation people but a truth that should be told), their lives and the creatures with whom they cohabited on our vast land. I remember with great joy scrambling up and down Noarlangie Rock in Kakadu for hours thinking of our first nation’s existence through the landscape and cave art, being transported to a different world as the sun rose over the landscape and exhausted but delighted to meet my own culture in the carpark at the end of a day long walk having listened in on Aboriginal guide’s interpretations of parts of the walk along the way. Hearing magpie geese and other birds settle, watching the sun set over billabongs full of lilies refolding their petals as I reflected on the make up of cultural pluralism in Australia is not so different from reflecting on the cultural repression of Russians exposed in the Golden Cockerel in Moscow or the plight of women in late nineteenth century Germany or Europe in the Ring. The exception in my view is the context of the music and man’s ability to mimic and create music and drama.

I have attended consecutive days of culture – Womad being a common and recent one. 4 days of world music, exhibitions, talks from musicians from all over the world across four stages in a park full of people passionate about our planet, music and social issues. A week of women’s solidarity in music at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and Adelaide’s own Arts Festival, its Fringe and Feast festival. All require passion persistence and stamina.

Jacinta and her mum introduced me to opera. I could see that it was a spectacle but was a bit weary when I attended my first opera – Salome. A man did spend a lot of time singing in a beautiful low voice up through a hole in the stage denoting his imprisonment. I have been privileged to attend opera in a number of countries and heard it in a number of languages from Mandarin to romance languages based on Latin. I learned to love it, the music, the performance, the spectacle and how the illusion that the live stage performance enthrals its audience into feeling emotions and through that gaining insights to humankind. Not to mention the adrenalin rush of live theatre.

So it was with great excitement I came to Melbourne for the Ring. I had seen film screened live of the third night's performance in Adelaide in 2004 and decided if it was on again in Australia I’d have to make the effort to go. On that resolve I spent what I consider a small fortune on seats in the middle of the gods, took leave, and flew across without a clear idea of what Neil Armfield would do with the Ring. Although the Australian Opera sent me lots of information I was a wee bit busy and didn’t take the time to read it until the day of each performance.

We lucked opening night. There was many a black betide man accompanying a women in black elegant expensive dress with glitter attached tastefully to her ensemble somewhere. Although I had a little glitter I did feel underdressed. But far better shod than as traveller when I wore jeans and a T-shirt to operas because that was my travel garb.

No recording or photography is permitted so I don’t have extraordinary photos to go with the words.

I can tell you I walked down into the maroon plush of the State Theatre in Melbourne and felt extremely special to be a member of the audience and enjoyed people watching as the orchestra of 120 warmed up. The maestro walked out, the lights went down and the drama began. Three hours passed evoking many feelings in me including thrall, delight, amazement, joy, bon hommie at fleeting humorous depictions like giants appearing on cherry pickers dressed in grey business suits with pink ties evoking a sinister hint of gangsters being lowered down two or three storeys as we assimilated their ‘giantness’ as they became live in our drama. It is really just a fairy tale, a farcical rendering of Norse legends to an alternate reality. But for those three hours it became my reality! Husband and wife squabbled like old married couples, greed lust and hate overcame justice love and respect, odd family relationship occurred, heroes gods and mortals interrelated because (yes opera is not usually highly rated on feminist principles) three Rhine maidens got sloppy and bored by yet another gold digger or lustful admirer’s pick up lines and gave away the secret to the golden treasure they guarded for their father! A dwarf (also wearing a grey suit) managed to make a magical ring with the help of an enslaved workforce and greed and cunning of men led through many an hour of fantastic orchestration, superb singing and excellent stage illusion to the fall of the gods and the rise of the mortal heroes.

Some how I had an impression that Wagnerian opera was dour, turgid but splendid. No dour or turgid has yet appeared! The music is delightful. Its orchestration exquisite. Some of the music was familiar to me (apart from the Cry of the Valkyries) which was a surprise.

After the first night’s performance I noticed that most of the singing was individual, not duets or choruses, although at times many people were on stage. Indeed the opening scene was a ring of people in bathing costumes lying on the stage moving a little here and there but not altogether. At first I thought it was a lighting pattern. A mirror seemingly the width of the stage captured the many tens of swimmers who started to move about the stage doubling their mass by their reflections. But they had not uttered words let alone sang them. Later the slave gold miner’s and smiths wandered up and down, in and out of the stage and only one of many tens of them sang a note.

I was delighted by the movement of the lazy susan type round in the stage which allowed two people on stage to move and appear to be travelling; they just walked a few steps across the front of the round. I loved the modern look of costumes and the minimalist set design was fantastic. I loved the snow dropping on a lonely wood cabin, making it almost look like a dolls cabin in the vast blackness of the stage depicting cold snowy isolated backwoods. I went on a tour of the theatre today to find the dimensions of the stage are 45m wide and deep. Not all the width is exposed at once but there is a huge area for just one or two singers to fill. They and their voices filled the vacuous space rising mellifluously above the orchestra.

It was not until the final half hour of the third night's performance that I had heard a duet. It was a love scene. I had either a touch of opera fatigue or my feminist beliefs blocked some of the emotion. It was fabulous. He learning fear and losing it in his love for her; her losing her eternal youth and delighting in him.

My friends tell me that to enjoy opera you have to leave some of your personal beliefs behind and enjoy the spectacle. That may be so but in snippets of interval conversations and reflections while waiting for the trains, many a discussion passionately espoused emotions and feelings, philosophy, views of the world, analysis of history and current social economic political and environmental issues. I have to say, I've reflected and discussed many things on the train ride home.

For opera buffs I'll leave you to read the guff about this performance. Suffice to say I have had a fantastic time. But my point is that it is a marathon. We are lucky to have Kim's house to stay in. Its a 20 walk to the station, a 35 minute ride to town, a ten minute walk to the theatre; the same in return but an extra 12 minutes because the train loops the city underground on its way home. So we spend 70 - 95 minutes commuting each way; we have late nights, we have had sessions of 3 hours straight, and 6 and 7 hours with intervals; we are building up our stamina at sitting - in seats not designed for lengthy sits; it is a marathon and tomorrow it finishes! I'll be sad and delighted all at once.

I'm having breakfast with Ange and Jacinta on Tuesday morning and then flying off to my next adventure.

I don't think I'll turn into one of those jet setters who fly around the world to see the Ring Cycle every year or two. I have had a superlative experience and a great adventure with a damn good adventure partner.

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