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Yuja Wang behind the scenes of \u2018Playing with Fire\u2019 \u00a9 VIVE Arts and Atlas V<\/p>\nUnlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free<\/p>\n
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Yuja Wang is immersed. First in water, then in fire. Her audience has been told not to touch her, or her instrument. But even if we felt moved to disobey, this would be difficult. We can no longer see our own hands.<\/p>\n
Over the next few months, the Beijing-born American pianist, feted since\u00a0Gramophone declared her its 2009 Young Artist of the Year, will be tackling Prokofiev\u2019s second piano concerto in halls in Vienna, Amsterdam and Los Angeles. During this time, it will also be possible to catch her in Paris, performing Ravel and Debussy while submerged in the sea, hovering inside a volcano, and marooned on an ice floe under the pale light of the moon. In Playing with Fire\u00a0at the Mus\u00e9e de la musique, Wang also recites poetry by Paul Verlaine. Hourly and in heels.<\/p>\n
To experience this \u2014 and the sight of your body, and the bodies of your fellow audience members, transformed into limbless knitted cones and tubular figures with animal faces \u2014 a virtual reality helmet must be worn. The attendants who screw your head into these devices see something different: people moving gingerly around a large empty room, circling a very expensive piece of kit: a Steinway Spirio player piano, which can record the subtleties of an individual performance and play them back. <\/p>\n
VR is a shorthand for the future. It has caused some to prophesy the doom of two-dimensional screen entertainment; generated philosophical disputes about the moral weight of actions we might perform within its simulated spaces. Right now, though, it seems as much about yesterday as tomorrow. The pianist we encounter in\u00a0Playing with Fire\u00a0is not the corporeal figure we see in a concert hall, or up close on film. She is made of light. She glows like a projection from a magic lantern.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Paris has a historical affinity with such technologies. In the 1820s, Daguerre\u2019s diorama theatre used painted canvases, screens and shutters to create illusions such as a congregation arriving for midnight mass at Saint-\u00c9tienne-du-Mont; in the 1890s, Georges Demen\u00ff\u2019s Phonoscope projected moving images from glass discs, to live musical accompaniment.\u00a0Playing with Fire\u00a0is their descendant; most clearly when, at the end of the show, we take off our helmets and watch the Spirio piano\u2019s keys ripple without the help of Wang\u2019s apparition. Everything new seems old again.<\/p>\n
Wang is an enthusiast for combining music with digital tech. Last year she performed at Lightroom, the subterranean venue at King\u2019s Cross, during its Hockney show,\u00a0Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away), playing Prokofiev and Glass while projections of the artist\u2019s forests and meadows unfolded around her. The show was well-reviewed, but those seated at the back, where critics are rarely placed, heard the quiet passages lose a battle with the fans required to keep the projectors cool. As the gig took place in a concrete bunker, it felt like being part of a coterie of survivors, dreaming of life that had once flourished on the surface.<\/p>\n
Playing with Fire, though, is more pre- than post-apocalyptic. And that\u2019s as much to do with the repertoire as the technology. Ravel\u2019s\u00a0\u201cJeux d\u02bceau\u201d\u00a0(1901) begins the programme, causing eldritch tentacles to sprout from the floor. Its climax is Debussy\u2019s\u00a0\u201cClair de Lune\u201d (1905), a response to the Verlaine poem of that name, which places us in a frozen world bathed in cold moonlight. Audience members, if they see each other at all, acquire animal masks that never quite come into focus, even if they approach a fellow visitor and stare straight into their faces.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe poem by Verlaine that inspired Debussy,\u201d explains Playing with Fire\u2019s director, Pierre-Alain Giraud, \u201cspeaks about people wearing masks, and singing in a minor key. Perhaps the masks we wear to temporarily forget that we\u2019re going to die.\u201d Although\u00a0Playing with Fire\u00a0is calculated to be as accessible as possible, Giraud is thrillingly relaxed about discussing its elements of anxiety and uncertainty. He does not object to it being thought of as decadent art \u2014 not in the sense of being self-indulgent or immoral, but in its rejection of authenticity and its embrace of melancholy.<\/p>\n
Yuja Wang behind the scenes of \u2018Playing with Fire\u2019 \u00a9 VIVE Arts and Atlas V<\/p>\n
Ravel would probably have approved. His house was crammed with exquisite technologies. A tiny clockwork nightingale; a little sailing-boat, which, when a hidden handle was cranked, surged over waves of cut wallpaper. Like the hero of one of his favourite books, JK Husymans\u2019 novel\u00a0\u00c0 rebours\u00a0\u2014 a man who kills a tortoise trying to pimp its shell with asparagus-green gemstones \u2014 Ravel revelled in the confected, the artificial. He loved to lead admiring guests through his rooms, declaring: \u201cAll this is fake!\u201d<\/p>\n
At the end of\u00a0Playing with Fire, nobody applauded, although the light-made image of Wang took a bow anyway. The silence was that of hard-bitten journalists at a private view, but it might also have been the correct response. Wang\u2019s shadow is caught in this machine \u2014 enslaved to it, perhaps \u2014 preserving the way she moved and played, in the field of its motion-capture cameras, on a day in the 38th\u00a0year of her life. And once her image had shimmered away, and we had removed our masks, it seemed impossible to avoid the idea that one day she will die, and so will we.<\/p>\n
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