Catalogue > At random

“ Tragedy ” brings forth an altered experience of the infamous opera La traviata. Producing a new mise-en-scene composed of the routine labour around the stage, the film is an enquiry into the nature of performance, re-framing the culture of the work place and the “ grand narratives ” of the opera. Mimicking the framing device of a play within a play, the film exposes a production of production while tracking the processes at work behind the scenes during live performances at The Grand Theatre and Opera House, in Leeds, UK. The film captures the movement, work and conversations of stage managers, backstage crew and offstage performers, bringing an operatic tradition into context with present-day realities and pronouncing the mechanics that create an experience. These individuals develop as characters in a new alternative performative event over the three acts of the live performance. Direct parallels are drawn between the urgency and tension of the live performance onstage and the choreography played out offstage, where discrete conversations between characters behind the scenes marry up with the dialogue taking place in the libretto. Keeping true to the “ real-time ” of the live performance and in reference to the live screen-based broadcasts of theatrical productions in cinemas, “ Tragedy ” provides a counterpoint, directing our attention to the theatre that exists aside the stage.

Lynne Marsh is a Canadian artist, currently living and working in Los Angeles. Her practice is concerned with questioning the status of the image through mediation, technology and production. Ideas central to Lynne Marsh’s practice include offstage space; production-in-production; affective and cultural labour; music as a framing device; and the Brechtian revealing of the mechanics of cultural and theatrical production. Her works capture the behind-the-scenes workings and turn the camera onto subjects whose labour and gestures support and mediate events. In doing so, her works address the political dimension of its scenography. Marsh’s formal and conceptual strategies emphasize the camera’s performance as a means to reconfigure social space, presenting the mechanics that create an experience as a type of theatre or performance in its own right. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at Berlinische Galerie (2017); Opera North, Leeds (2016); fig2@Institute for Contemporary Art, London (2015); Scrap Metal, Toronto International Film Festival (2014); and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2008). Her work has been featured in biennials and at institutions including La Biennale de Montréal (2014); The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2012); 53 Art Museum, Guangzhou (2011); The Québec City Biennial (2010) and the 10th International Istanbul Biennial (2007).