05/07/2024
Thank you for the music
I know there's other stuff going on, but I want to talk about ABBA Voyage (my keyboard can't cope with the reversed "B'), which I saw last night. And which is truly extraordinary, redefining - as so many others have said - what a "live" performance can be. I'm going to start with a few reflections here, and then I want to try to write something more considered (and I'd definitely be up for contributing to a workshop or min-conference about it).
Warning: contains spoilers; also, I may add to this later, and I'd love to get the reactions of others who have been. I also haven't really read anything about it, but I now want to search out everything I can find - recommendations very welcome.
The large arena is purpose-built, just by Pudding Mill Lane DLR station. The audience, and it was a sell-out, was overwhelmingly white, predominantly middle-aged, and maybe 2/3s women. There are banks of seating around an "arena'/dance floor, and Clare and I were right towards the back of the central seating area.
Before the show there's a triptych video projection of a vaguely scandi forest with a light snow fall and ambient music. After a request/warning about no photos or recordings (and the staff spend much of their time telling people off for using, or trying to use, their mobiles), the 90-minute show plays continuously - and for much of the running time is truly spectacular.
The ABBA avatars are "on stage" for maybe half of the show, perhaps a little more, and I'm surprised about this. Otherwise we get, variously and for several full numbers, video of the avatars as if in a very complex promo clip; video of their Eurovision win performing 'Waterloo'; two lengthy sequences of a frankly risible anime-type animation, with a vaguely oriental young mythic hero travelling through a forest and then a castle, searching for something, and then finally being transfigured into a glittering star - I had no idea what this was about; and a LIVE BAND.
The band was the biggest surprise, with three singers and maybe a dozen musicians (guitars, keyboards, percussion, sax), stage right, accompanying (or were they?) some of the numbers, and having their own spot when ABBA "themselves" take a break. All of this adds another layer of complexity to the inevitable questions of "the real" / liveness / (co-)presence.
As for the avatars, I have to say I found them, for a fair distance of course, strikingly "real" - solid, truly three-dimensional, bright, absolutely believable. Indeed they look more convincing as living humans than the figures in the image below, which still have a sense of the digital about them.
For many numbers the movement of the avatars is precisely co-ordinated with large-scale video images, many in large close-ups, projected behind and to the sides, as if they were being filming in real time. But there are no cameras! All of this is in some way digitally generated.
Then the same thing happens with the live band, so that we see "live video" images of them performing. But again it appears as if there are no cameras, so are they choreographed to the pre-recorded images?
Another surprise is that the avatars are not presented as young figures, but rather as Agnetha, Anni-Frid, Benny and Bjorn
perhaps were around the age of forty. They look great of course, but I find this decision especially fascinating.
There's some hokiness in terms of talking to the audience, jojkes about costume changes, and giving the sense that what is taking place is an actual live show. And the audience definitely treats it as such, dancing, singing along, waving their arms in the air, and applauding widely after each number. (Reader, I joined in too, although not so much with the applause, which seemed ridiculous to me.)
All of it takes place within a dazzling immersive light show, with projections and mirrors and strings of bulbs hung from the ceiling. The density and depth and detail of the light world for 'Dancing Queen' especially was breath-taking.
Then at the end, two weird things happen. As the avatars sink down below the stage, we're left with a seemingly endless, diverse line of singers right at the back, completing a chorus in full voice. I thought they were "real", but Clare was convinced this was a film projection - but this shows you how the whole thing plays with your perceptions (and I like to think I'm pretty savvy about what's real and what's digital).
And finally, ABBA as they are now come on to take the applause and the audience's love, both as avatars of their aged bodies and as video images. Extraordinary.
In a way, I loved it, and while I'm a very long way from a fan, I've seen the stage show and watched the two movies with my family numerous times. I truly enjoyed (most of) it - I'd definitely cut the animations - as a spectacle, and at the same time I had a professional/academic fascination with it all. So I kept slipping into and out of - to some kind of critical distance, or at least wonderment - the performance.
I came away with a host of questions, including what on earth Siegfried Kracauer would have made of it all?
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