Digital decadence

>> Damen und Herren, you’re invited to
A Night at the Red Light Cabaret

RED LIGHTS, GREEN FAIRIES: Angell as Anna

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

The MixSessions events at the SAT can always be counted on for the eclectic and the unexpected, but the upcoming A Night at the Red Light Cabaret, a collaboration with Montreal’s POD Theatre group, is especially promising—a collision of high technology and low living, elegance and decadence.

“There are going to be some opera numbers, music-hall numbers and of course projections,” says POD’s artistic director and composer, the mono-monikered mïka. “It’s basically taking the whole idea of cabarets from Berlin and bringing it into the context of today, with projections and digital music.

“There’s the underlying story about Anna, who’s a character inspired by a piece of Kurt Weill’s and Bertolt Brecht’s, called “The Seven Sins.” She arrives at the cabaret, and the idea is that, in this evolving evening, we go from the glamour of music-hall, retrograding down to the trashy cabarets of Berlin. So instead of going upwards, we go downwards.”

And happily so—following a series of cabaret numbers by Angell (as Anna), Chantale Woods and dancers comes a DJ-and-VJ mix by Catherine Turp, Athanore and RoBeat, as well as what mïka calls “some absinthe-ish drinks.” The evening is intended to serve as a calling card for the POD people, a public display of their distinctive sensibility, which filters the ideas and images of yesteryear through the screens and machines of modern media.

“We’ve been working for a couple of years with Opéra de Montreal and SAT, quite a bit. We’ve been very involved with the technOpera series, and through the whole process, we’ve developed our own language, I guess, where we see electronic music and media arts as something very theatrical. We’re more than just a regular theatre company, in the sense that we develop our own music, our own product.

“As a first rule, we’re interested in innovation, but the way we see it, if you want to move forward, you have to look back. You have to understand that’s been done before and accept that there’s a lot of richness that we’ve kind of forgotten about. We talk about multimedia as if we invented everything, but if you look at opera, it’s all been done before. The technology is just an extension.”

At SAT on Thursday,
July 19, 9 p.m., $6