Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde already represents a culture clash, with a German text inspired by Chinese poetry set to music of early 20th-century Viennese headiness. Sea Beneath the Skin takes that a whole ocean further. The brainchild of the Samoan director, artist and choreographer Lemi Ponifasio, it’s an unclassifiable music-theatre piece that’s less a collision of worlds than a collusion between them.
It begins with a woman walking on to the dark, glossy-floored stage, on which two white pillars stretch up to the roof to represent the trunks of giant kauri trees. Her song, rich-toned and short-phrased, is eventually answered by another woman high in the auditorium, and their duet grows in urgency and intensity. Later there will be four black-clad men dancing a neat cyclical routine involving lots of body percussion, then a third woman facing us down with terrifyingly aggressive shouted chants, and then a young man in Kiribati ceremonial dress, pouring white sand on to the stage from a black plastic bucket. What do these mean? It’s not clear, but they all frame and link the six movements of Mahler’s song cycle, in which the two singers are on stage as characters in some kind of undefined narrative.
The first notes of the Mahler sounded ornate, strange and almost bejewelled in this new context, even though the Britten Sinfonia were playing a version by Iain Farrington that condenses Mahler’s huge orchestra, efficiently and imaginatively, to just 16 players. There were translations of the texts for the Mahler songs but not the Pasifika chants, which reinforced the idea, perhaps inevitable in London, that the latter were the “exotic” components – but you could argue that this allowed the imagination more space. The actual texts of the Mahler seemed of secondary importance to the passion put into their delivery by the tenor Sean Panikkar, sounding especially heroic of voice in the first song, and the velvet-toned mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron.
They and the conductor Nuno Coelho were only partly visible, playing from behind a gauze at the back. The gauze formed the screen for some largely monochrome videos: flowers opening, underwater explosions, people who might have been wading through floods. Blurry and broken up by the tree trunks, they were often hard to make out and didn’t seem designed to coincide with the music with any precision. For this reason Sea Beneath the Skin, which was first seen in its current form in Luxembourg in 2024, still has the feel of a work in progress. Yet put it next to other works on the theme of climate change – the Barbican’s Fragile Earth series is showcasing several – and it feels absorbingly, strikingly different: not a lecture but an appeal to the senses and the imagination.
