{"id":75043,"date":"2023-02-23T00:00:49","date_gmt":"2023-02-23T05:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/operawire.com\/?p=75043"},"modified":"2023-02-21T16:54:00","modified_gmt":"2023-02-21T21:54:00","slug":"opera-meets-film-peter-sellars-this-body-is-so-impermanent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/operawire.com\/opera-meets-film-peter-sellars-this-body-is-so-impermanent\/","title":{"rendered":"Opera Meets Film: Peter Sellars’ ‘this body is so impermanent’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Sellars<\/a> warned the crowd gathered in the Rubin Museum<\/a> on a recent Friday night that the film would be long. \u201cIt\u2019s only an hour and fifteen minutes,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the beginning feels like several lifetimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first, the caution was unnecessary. “this body is so impermanent,” a new film Sellars directed at the height of the pandemic, explores health and illness through the “Vimalakirta Sutra,” a foundational Buddhist text. Opening in a rush of sensation, “this body” stirs the senses with scenes of nature, water gushing over rocks, and raven-black calligraphy ink scraped in a bowl, with a fast cut to a delightfully hexagonal, sunlit window. A man lays in bed but quietly.<\/p>\n

Near the 20-minute mark, though, novelty sinks into the glacial reality of the topic of sickness. The man squirms with malaise, distinguishing the work as less of a film and more of a meditation (as Sellars offered) on \u201csickness as not just an affliction, but as a teaching, a spiritual path.\u201d<\/p>\n

Genesis<\/h2>\n

“this body is so impermanent” began as exploratory workshops at the Rubin over ten years ago as a collaboration of master artists, including vocalist and composer Ganavya<\/a>, improvisatory dancer Michael Schumacher<\/a>, and renowned calligrapher Wang<\/a> Dongling<\/a>. The group intended to begin performances in museums in 2020\u2013before, as Sellars explained, \u201cthe world was exploding.\u201d The work\u2019s current format took root once a colleague mused, \u201ca Buddhist sutra belongs in cyberspace.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s inspiration, the third-century “Vimalakirti Sutra” in Robert Thurman\u2019s translation, centers on Licchavi Vimalakirti, a contemporary of Buddha accomplished in both meditation and business and\u2013especially crucial to the sutra\u2019s intended audience\u2013not an exalted monk. The four-paragraph excerpt deals with Vimalakirti amid a grave illness, which he uses to instruct a vast host of gods and bodhisattvas assembled in his home about the transience of the physical form and the path to enlightenment found by rejecting earthly passions.<\/p>\n

From this selection, it\u2019s less obvious how fantastical and outrageous the text is\u2014by turn solemn and almost conspiratorially funny. The speaker spends many a verse extolling an inconceivable number of meditators and their mastery of countless virtues such as the \u201cfour fearlessnesses,\u201d the \u201ceighteen special qualities,\u201d and the \u201csixty-two convictions,\u201d all within the \u201cuniverses of the ten directions.\u201d The hyperbole is playfully inconsistent; are there actually five or six super-knowledges? As a religious text, its comic tones recall Salman Rushdie, another figure for whom no ancient content is too sacred to be repurposed with a timely message<\/a>. Sellars has repeatedly mentioned <\/a>his fascination with the sutra and his intention to stage it in its entirety\u2013which would be a must-see event.<\/p>\n

Development and Themes<\/h2>\n

Developed in the fall of 2020 over Zoom, the artists held in common virtuosity and prior relationships. With everyone else, they shared pandemic-era isolation and hardship, and with no one, location, or time zones. Spanning three continents, Ganavya recorded after midnight in an Oregon chapel, Schumacher danced in his apartment in Amsterdam, Dongling wrote calligraphy in Hangzhou, and Sellars directed from Los Angeles. The roster grew to include cinematographer Yu Lik-wai and editor Tim Squyres, among others. These creatives tuned into one another in a daily ritual of Zoom squares.<\/p>\n

Though unquestionably a meditation, the film unfurls in several phases, first establishing respective journeys for the singer, dancer, and calligrapher. In a small bedroom, Schumacher lays in stillness amidst a growing sense of expectancy around his body. Ganavya, a dynamic performer with a signature vocalism at the crossroads of South Indian and contemporary styles, imparts the text in earthy melismas that dissipate into smoke. Dongling\u2019s initial scenes centered on the sutra, with his dancing brush hovering and gliding over expressive figures that were not the text or any readable Chinese script but an inspired abstraction. In contrast to Schumacher\u2019s and Ganavya\u2019s claustrophobic environs, Dongling appears in a spacious studio more conducive to the narrative, either working, reclining in apparent affliction, or practicing tai chi. The calligrapher was the only one, Sellars quipped, with a film crew.<\/p>\n

Evoking a sense of ritual, visual and sonic cadences punctuate the text: a ringing gong and a waterfall crashing and pouring with throes of sickness. Its intensity suggested both permanence\u2014an immortal landscape to which all people return\u2014and impermanence, with great volumes of people or water rushing past rocks, eventually tumbling into new formations. After the screening, Sellars noted the dual nature of water as both a destructive force and a vital source of rejuvenation. As it cycles through manifestations as cloud, water, and ice, \u201cit moves through possibilities but is never lost\u2026it leaves but also remains.\u201d The text shifts at one point to \u201clifeless like fire,\u201d and the sun rises above cliffs. Ganavya bursts into an ecstatic cadenza that rang within the auditorium before dissipating just as quickly.<\/p>\n

The Path of Sickness<\/h2>\n

Then, with a description of the human form as \u201cfragile, unworthy of confidence,\u201d the meditation\u2019s valley sets in. Schumacher writhes in sickness. Ganavya shifts into nearby but uncomfortable modes at the words \u201cit is void\u201d touch guttural vocal depths. Schumacher arches his back in a posture so hideous and unnatural as to evoke palpable unease, holding it there for an excruciating duration. Following the screening, reflections from audience members revealed heightened bodily awareness: the chairs were less than ideal, and backs stiffened against them. People fidgeted and worried over stray stomach gurgles.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, as Dongling runs out of ink, his dry, floppy brush scratches the paper. Eventually, a prolonged shot of empty sandals in the studio suggests the inevitable. Throughout the turbulence, Ganavya\u2019s voice and intermittent eye contact provide the only lifeline tethering the audience to the artists.<\/p>\n

Unexpectedly, another insistent shot of Schumacher\u2019s room becomes a cliff as walls give way to the sky. Rising for the first time, he carries a laptop\u2013and by extension, the film\u2019s perspective\u2013into a hallway and dances. At Ganavya\u2019s treatment of the word \u201cenlightenment,\u201d he toys with arms and legs as though for the first time. He’s a silhouette twisted against a sunlit window, holding the exalted poses of a Buddha. At the same time, he remains completely relatable, with a table lamp atop a radiator turning in the gloom of early evening. Like everyone in 2020, he was home alone.<\/p>\n

At \u201cvision of liberation,\u201d the brush was again wet and flowing. The artists\u2019 faces layered atop one another as their threads converged\u2013ephemeral\u2014but together more powerful and eclipsing physical ailment. In the final, exquisitely beautiful sequence, an image of Schumacher curling quietly in bed fades into a stony landscape divided by a waterfall for a few minutes that feel like many lifetimes. Long after his face had dissolved into the rugged rust-and binge-toned cliffside, it remains visible, like a Braque painting. His arm is the last to transform, melding into the bedrock and, with it, an unfathomable expanse of time.<\/p>\n

As Sellars told the crowd, when you\u2019re sick, \u201cyou have to put down all the things you were busy with. And suddenly you have time<\/em>\u2026it\u2019s not what we want, and nothing obeys your script, and you have to surrender to something that\u2019s going to take you to another place.\u201d As a meditation, this body is so impermanent <\/em>opens a portal to an alternate existence that is never as far away as we might think. As Susan Sontag said, \u201ceveryone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.\u201d And while inconvenient, the latter is nonetheless a path.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Sellars warned the crowd gathered in the Rubin Museum on a recent Friday night that the film would be long. \u201cIt\u2019s only an hour and fifteen minutes,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the beginning feels like several lifetimes.\u201d At first, the caution was unnecessary. “this body is so impermanent,” a new film Sellars directed at the height of the pandemic, explores {…}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":75083,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2348],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opera-meets-film"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOpera Meets Film: Peter Sellars' 'this body is so impermanent' - OperaWire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Explore the spiritual journey of health and illness through a Buddhist text in Peter Sellars' film, "this body is so impermanent."\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/operawire.com\/opera-meets-film-peter-sellars-this-body-is-so-impermanent\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Opera Meets Film: Peter Sellars' 'this body is so impermanent' - 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