The expression ‘Mozart’s sadness runs like a wind, his tears never catch up with it’ gives us an idea of melancholy depicted in Mozart’s music. The grief that runs through Mozart’s Requiem is often associated with human life, but two of the works in this year’s Mostly Mozart Festival explore a different kind of loss: environmental.

The pieces represented a shift from life to death that Mozart would never have considered. They addressed issues of climate change, rising sea levels and other threats to the earth. The works, one by the choreographer Lemi Ponifasio and the other by the artist Lynette Wallworth, use the problems facing the natural world to touch on the theme of the festival, loss and transformation, in unexpected ways.
Both Ponifasio and Wallworth hail from the Pacific Rim, and their relationship with that region very much informs their work.

Ponifasio, from Samoa, explores Oceanic cultures and their philosophies and genealogy in his choreography and his “Requiem” builds on those interests. Commissioned by Peter Sellars for the New Crowned Hope festival in Vienna to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth in 2006, it doesn’t contain a note of Mozart. But Ponifasio sees the work as being on a gamut with the 18th-century masterpiece.

It is the members of this group who are faced with the ecological transformations explored in the piece. Many of Mau’s members come from the Kiribati islands, where sea levels have been rising. At an environmental conference in New Zealand in June, that tiny nation said that the water threat due to climate change was making its lands uninhabitable and asked for help with a migration plan for its citizens.
To make ‘Requiem’ itself “is to think about the departure of life in terms of all the islands of the planet,” Ponifasio said.

In the piece, which seems to suspend time, bodies travel very slowly across the dramatically lighted stage to spoken words, chants and natural sounds. The dancers undulate and articulate different muscles from across the shoulders to the fingertips in a kind of ceremony for death. Figures occasionally come forward or separate from the group to communicate to the audience with both abstract and traditional gestural movements.

For Mau, as for most Pacific Islanders, environmental issues are a matter of daily life. The islands, while culturally dynamic, are fragile ecologically, Ponifasio said. He added that pollution, nuclear experiments and spacecraft debris are among the problems facing the region. “Things like that all accelerate what’s going on,” he said. “It’s not something that we are waiting for. It’s something that is already here. Already homes have been destroyed, people have moved out.”

The Pacific is far from the Lincoln Center office of Jane Moss, artistic director of the festival. But from her perch overlooking the campus’s redevelopment construction, she said the two pieces, which she first saw at the New Crowned Hope, fit with the festival’s overarching theme of transformation.
Whether art can serve to effect change, environmentally or otherwise, is always debatable. Ponifasio has his own ideas on the subject.

Via NYT