1995 Melbourne International Festival of the Arts
1995 Greek Festival of Sydney
1992 Premiere - Abel Tasman Festival, Hobart

SYNOPSIS
To Traverse Water depicts a young Greek woman's departure for Australia and her settlement there. Her tale is loosely based on that of Koukias’ mother. Direct reference is made to his mother at the end of the show when a slide picture of her appears, along with a tape of her voice intoning an old village song. Spectators are not told who this aging woman is. But then they do not really need to know since she is an archetype and her story so like the story of countless women of non-English speaking background coming to Australia.

The audacious beauty of To Traverse Water comes from its perfect blend of music, operatic singing and folk song, drama, dance, light sculpture, art installations and film, the whole creating a hybrid genre, a unique piece of performance theatre that defies standard artistic labels. Let us keep, though, the 'Opera' part of IHOS’ name on the understanding that we are talking about a new kind of opera rather than a traditional form of it, and that this new opera, in its process of mixing and merging, is breaking the boundaries between all forms.

The opera's narrative is presented in a simple, montage structure. Part One is set in Greece, Part Two in Australia. Despina, the heroine of the story, and her parents, friend Galani, a young boy and a Greek Orthodox priest move slowly in and out of the shadows and among several large white rocks etching out a barren landscape. Despina learns that she has been promised in marriage to a young Greek immigrant in Australia. Part One ends with a highly stylised, minimalist dance in slow motion. This is Despina's journey, hand in hand with Galani, towards a mysterious destination suggested superbly, psychodelically, by patterns of light moulding movement and space, by masses of water that begin to flow over the floor, and by the ‘ballet of the boats’, as this segment is entitled.

The lights by Jan WawrzynCzak go from blue to gold and to green and purple, now creating long shadows and smoke effects, now luminous shafts. The boats hang high up, diagonally, from the rafters and are turned to the audience. Their dark hulls and oars, which swing and dip - this is their ballet - make them look like gigantic turtles swimming in the air. It is a stupendous sight. Meanwhile, the instrumentalists play full blast, filling the entire wharf with sound as Despina and Galani's silhouettes diminish and then vanish altogether in a sudden black out.

Part Two opens with familiar, all-Australian icons that clamour for immediate recognition - and get it, judging by the audience's laughter. There is a Hills hoist (a square, large metal contraption for hanging clothes), a backyard lawn, a barbecue, a white outdoor table and chairs, a concrete footpath that the married Despina hoses down, and a lawn mower, start-up rope, and smoke, and all.

The spectators, who sit for the Greek section at one end of the gigantic wharf, come in, after the interval, to the extreme opposite side, their physical displacement echoing the passage of time and the change of place anticipated by the action before the interval. Moreover, the break for the audience is a symbolic break referring to Despina's cut with her familial, geographic and cultural ties. In other words, the audience, traverses water with her and re-enacts, with her, the great mythical journeys of antiquity, the odysseys that are a process of both internal and external discovery.

Yet the double division occurring in unison, in the narrative and in space-time, does not indicate a clear-cut separation between the past and the present, or the 'old' and the 'new' worlds. The whole of Part Two is interspersed with visual or vocal signs recalling Despina's father or mother, or the boy who hopped on the rocks in Greece, or the priest with his cross and incense. It also gives sharp flashes of the nineteen fifties/early sixties in which the section is situated, such as the rattling train rides Despina and her husband Tasos took to work and the factory machines whose super-size turning wheels and pistons kick and bang. These images are projected in black and white on to the side wall of the building, or on to the screen that drops down momentarily for cinematic purposes. Or else pictures are shot on to the white sheets that Despina and her Greek-Australian women friends hang up on the hoist and take down again - a gendered division of labour laconically perceived. Apart from their narrative function and the details of social history that they provide, the flashes back across Despina's years in Australia are pieces of her memory of herself and of who she has become.

Tasos, for his part, fiddles with the lawn mower or the barbecue. Towards the end of the show he stacks crates of apples (a possible joke, since Tasmania is the apple state of Australia!) His unexpected fit of violent rage abruptly changes the mood of the scene, highlighting through its mixture of anger and resignation the feeling of emptiness that haunts the entire performance, and lingers on, despite the numerous funny, often surrealistic bits of collage that make up Part Two. For all its mod cons (relative to the fifties, of course), the Australia captured by the production is not a new, but an old land. The cry of the sea gulls linking Despina's departure from Greece to her arrival in Australia is counter-pointed by the voices, rhythms and sounds that could well belong to the indigenous peoples who lived in the country long before any white settlement. One ancient land meets another.

The sense of antiquity is conveyed, above all, through the music and lyrics - through how pagan-like wailing, Greek folksongs from time immemorial, Byzantine chant and fragments from Greek Orthodox liturgy connect to each other. Texts from the Old and New Testaments and the I Ching are sung in Greek, although phrases are translated into English in the surtitles which, because they are at eye level, are not so much surtitles as an integral component of the artistic organisation of the whole. But the ancient world of sound, which is also revived through a set of Uilleann Pipes, blends in with the contemporary world of electronically-treated acoustic instruments, harmonium and percussion, and a electric violin played stunningly. All of it put together sustains a work that strongly resembles a ritual.

The ritualistic tone is set in the opening scenes through how water is poured from jugs and fire wheels spit and fizzle; through how candles are lit and held, and a trunk opened suddenly, letting out burning flames, like spirits from Pandora’s box. It is there, too, in the dignified, deliberate Greek dance steps made by Despina's father. These are steps she and Tasos will repeat in Part Two. Ritual and magic are always evoked by the lighting, whose extraordinary colours, some of which merge into mist, make of To Traverse Water an enigmatic landscape and seascape, and also other-world, all in one. No spectator who has seen this production can ever forget Despina's walking, in the last sequence of Part One, along the vast playing space towards the back where long rays of light open out, giving suns and seas that dwarf, but do not crush her. The synthesis of performance elements is exhilarating.

Despina's odysseys from Greece to Australia and in Australia as a Greek are culturally specific. Nevertheless, give or take significant variations on immigration as a historical phenomenon, Despina's relocation is a cameo of the experiences of the various ethnic communities who migrated to Australia in the nineteen forties and fifties. Koukias is well aware of the common points between these different groups. Just the same, what makes his opera like no other performance work to which the term 'multicultural' might be applicable in Australia today, is its being an artistic genre like no other, a genre that, by stripping away all sorts of formal conventions - as well as aesthetic expectations on the part of spectators - undermines social and cultural clichés and gives a fresh, clear view of immigrant realities.

Streaming Media from To Traverse Water
Spirits of the Hills Hoist
The Calm Beneath Our Feet
Do Not Be Afraid
Angel Bringeth, Angel Taketh Away
Seek Your Destiny
Today A Wedding Is Taking Place

Floor Plan (PDF)
To Traverse Water 1992 Program (PDF)
To Traverse Water 1995 Program (PDF)


Reviews for To Traverse Water

Article - The Age, 1995. (PDF)
Review - The Australian, 1995. (PDF)
Review - The Mercury, 1992 (PDF)
Article - Shirley Apthorp, 1992 (PDF)
Review - Sydney Morning Herald, 1995 (PDF)
Article - Sydney Morning Herald, 1995 (PDF)
Review - Opera Opera, 1992 (PDF)