ARTSCAPE
quaterly magazine of essays and commentary on contemporary art and culture

Highlights from Artscape Spring Issue 2006

Les Fleurs du Mal:
The Thinking Man's Ritual Theatre presents
THEREMINIAD

Les Fleurs du Mal, "The Thinking Man's Ritual Theater" (founded in New York, 1996) is a traveling troupe, dedicated to re-marry science and art, in the form of electronic rituals. They are presently on a tour of Europe, with their new show, THEREMINIAD. It is an electro-theatrical epoch, based on the lives and times of Russian scientist and spy, Professor Leon Theremin, inventor of the world's first space-controlled electronic music instrument, the theremin. The following interview was recorded in Vienna (Austria) and Budapest (Hungary), after the premiere performance of Clara & Leon, the sixth part of the THEREMINIAD epoch.

Karl-Heinz Wienerblut (KHW): When and how did you come across Professor Theremin and his magic instrument?

DJ NoMore (NM): I saw Professor Theremin's last koncert in New York, in the early 1990s, which gave me the last push to start thinking of staging his incredible life-story. Being a great Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin and Bela Lugosi fan I was already familiar with the sound of the theremin by that time, and I knew some of the details of its inventor's enigmatic life, but I needed to experience him performing live, in order to get a boost of energy I was missing, for the serious research. He was one of the most charismatic performers I've ever seen on stage. He was playing duetts with Clara Rockmore, the greatest theremin virtuosa of all times. They did not appear as earthlings to me, at all. They were frail and ghostly, like projections from an old sci-fi movie. Yet there was this incredible spiritual energy, emanating from both. This mutual, obviously telephatic understanding between the two.

Professor Theremin was 93 years old then, Clara Rockmore 83. They had to be helped up to the stage, but as soon as they took up their position behind their theremins, they've regained perfect controll of their bodies. The theremin is the instrument hardest to play, because you don't have any physical contact with it. You must stand perfectly still, while playing the theremin. The machine senses your body-movements. You controll the sound - both pitch, velocitiy and volume, - by slight movements of your fingers and hands, in the empty space, near two antennas. If your body waves just a fragment of an inch inadvertently, you are out of tune, lose controll of velocity and volume. You must sense space like a blind Shao Lin warrior is capable of, in order to become an acceptable theremin player. These two, elegant old people stood there, up on the stage, perfectly still for almost an hour, as they were releasing those etheric waves of sound, literarly from the thin air. I was taken in an instant.

NM: All of him. The artist, the scientist, the spy, the predator, the victim, the husband, the lover - all of his attributes, all those incredible parallel lives, which made up this extraordinary person. I think of him as the very metaphore of our 20th century. Deeper I dig into his life, more layers of mysteries I find. His story is a contemporary legend, full of holes, misleading information, fake documents, hearsay, rumors, false testimonies, dead end streets. It was mostly written (forged) by the world's once most resourceful intelligence service, the Russian, with consciderable assistance from other countries's similar organizations, let us not forget about it. We'll never learn the full truth about this remarkable man. The first piece I wrote about him was an oratorio electronique, titled Theremin. It premiered in December, 2000, at the Hungarian Academy of Music.



Miriam Rakotomalala as Lavinia Williams
THEREMIN, an oratorio electronique
December 8-10, 2000, Hungarian Academy of Music, Budapest, (Photo: Moli)


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