This tape was shot during one of the performances of the opera ”St. Francois d’Assise”, conducted by Kent Nagano at the Salzburg festival in August 1998. I was working as a video assistant, playing the videos in to musical cues. It is an attempt to show the opera from a different angle and to make the performing part of the conductor visible, which usually stays hidden from the public but is an image very familiar to all people working on a production like this. The original tape is cut into stills which, put one after another, recreate the general movement. The audience plays a special role as well in a performance, it is the opposite part of the performance and its movement, a sort of mirror, even when its role can be seen as passive. Therefore, the only sound in the video is of the audience, which breaks its usual silence at the end of the performance. The study of the conductor’s movement stays focused on the visual expressions, a silent act. The choice of stills, instead of the normal flow of images, is an attempt to translate this movement into another temporality.
1999