Darkness And Light

The walkouts started 15 minutes into this 70-minute Festival show with one punter overheard saying, “I have been more entertained on the bus to work.”

While the show gave us an interesting glimpse of Belgian organist Bernard Foccroulle playing the very cool 19th century grand organ in Town Hall it was hard to connect it to video artist Lynette Wallworth’s images projected onto two screens above the organ. There were various images of bushfires, water, the outback and empty train tracks. But it became irritating watching them because the point of it all was not clear. We were sitting in a huge venue watching random pictures and listening to music that seemed to have no message and to be completely unrelated.

Taking its title from a piece by Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, Darkness And Light – we were told in a program note – “ranged across 350 years of organ music: from the baroque constructions of Bach... to the evocative sound pictures of Toshio Hosokawa”.  Lynette Wallworth’s projections even included (according to the program) “astronomical footage supplied by NASA”.

Her video works apparently explore the influence that darkness and light have on the human experience and are meant to be “inspired by Lewis-Williams theories of Entopic Imagery and the repetition of trance-like, geometric imagery represented in cave and rock art”. That may be so, but in this huge venue they were lost.

This was a Sydney Festival show that came across as pretentious and did not work for me and a lot of other punters in the audience. But it might have an audience somewhere in a smaller venue such as a gallery.

Sydney Town Hall (finished)