8 - Other Areas: The Bio-communal and Feminine Utopia of Cornucopia

Summary

MEANINGS OF CORNUCOPIA

Coloured petals unfurl and close in gigantic holograms, flowers, stems and various mushrooms which seem to advance towards us, the audience, from the back and the sides of the stage. Lines and stains which lengthen, expand and escape. Transparencies and mobile filters which reveal or suggest. Flashing lights which intermittently focus on the huge crowd. Everything surrounds us in Cornucopia, Icelandic singer Björk's show inspired by her 2018 album Utopia and premiered in 2019, which had Lucrecia Martel as theatrical director, who delighted us with the bodies on the stage just as she did from The Swamp/La ciénaga (2001) to Zama (2017). As in the futuristic fancies of the artist's other albums, as in the sensory and dense realisms of the Argentine director, we feel we step into a different time, with a different speed, and into a different space, with a new gravity.

On stage, Björk drifts with minimal and undulating movements, behind a dazzling mask which surrounds her eyes and in a white dress with tubular sleeves, absolutely retrofuturistic. Before our eyes she is at times almost imperceptible and surprisingly omnipresent; small on the stage, her body and her voice issue forth a force which magnetises space thoroughly. That presence is consistent with her music's sounds, from the constant whisper to the long wail. All the while she sings, in a mantric covenant of sorts, about caring for each other. The affectionate verse echoes in different tones in ‘The Gate’, the song aptly chosen to open the show. A cast of ethereal power joins Björk on a stage made up of platforms whose organic shapes suggest mushrooms and enable movements with appearances and disappearances. There we see Viibra, the all-female Icelandic seven-flute ensemble, whose members traverse the space lightly and, during one of the show's most intense moments, play a circular flute collectively, as a harmonious ring which moves apart only to come together again. We see a harpist too, whose image speaks of a different world. And we have Austrian percussionist Manu Delago, known from the musical experience born of the 2011 album Biophilia, who works miracles on the hang and resorts to natural elements like water and stone for his sound, which become music before our eyes.