How does one create art about a woman whose life and career was so much the result of refusing to be held down to a static identity? It’s the question Maxine Peake asks in The Nico Project, an entrancing experimental music production with the sense of a seance.
Featuring an orchestra comprised mainly of students of the Royal Northern College Of Music (with four Melbourne musicians), the work is centred on the music of The Marble Index, the album Nico made to wrest her image back from the men she is credited as muse to. It is an elusive, complicated performance, anchored by the fine direction of Sarah Frankcom. It succeeds at the immersion it’s after, dramatising Nico’s refusal to be held down as an imagined conversation between Peake-as-herself and Nico, and the orchestra is powerful in its evocation of Nico’s dark and eerie atmospheres.
Questions of Nico’s legacy are raised, but the abstract, music-focused nature of the work feels like a sanitisation of Nico’s image, despite Peake’s assertion that the production "does not agree with her". The show explores Nico past her involvement in The Velvet Underground and as the ‘muse’ of multiple artistic icons, but it also excises her bigoted views.
An enormous influence on music, whose experimental, baroque sound continues to haunt contemporary acts, Nico’s work was informed by the pain of trauma and addiction in a way that has been rendered again and again in tributes and documentaries. She was also known to share explicitly racist views, and the omission of this part of her life doesn’t feel so much like a denunciation as an obfuscation, regardless of the intentions of the production’s creators. In its search for ‘the truth’ of Nico’s art, The Nico Project comes up lacking and confused.
