O Enigmático Coelho

Um excerto da reportagem do New York Times sobre o Parsifal de Schlingensief: "Even if it did not provide the promised scandal, this "Parsifal" was certainly unlike any seen before at this festival. The knights of the Grail, whose leader, Amfortas, has been mortally wounded and must be saved by the holy fool Parsifal, have abandoned Wagner's mythological Middle Ages in favor of a deconstructed and symbol-strewn landscape that supposedly combined elements of Nepal and Namibia. In practice, the stage was a chaotic jumble of urban ruble, ancient Asian and African religious symbols and high-concept directorial statements such as a "Cemetery of Art" that shows up in the third act,  with famous paintings set out as tombstones. Wagner's characters also had a new multicultural look. The knights of the Grail, a disturbingly pure-blooded group in Wagner's original, were transformed into a motley crew of races and creeds more interested in pagan rituals than Christian religious rites, and the seductive maidens of the evil sorcerer Klingsor were bedecked in various combinations of feathers and tribal body paints. It all added up to an overwhelming visual picture, but Mr. Schlingensief did not stop there, layering on still more visuals with an almost constant stream of shifting filmic images projected onto scrims and onto the stage itself. The relationship of the images to the musical-dramatic moment was, shall we say, indirect: seals cavorting on the beach while Gurnemanz lamented the fate of the order of the Grail; a giant decomposing rabbit during the work's sublime conclusion. In fairness to Mr. Schlingensief, this was not as arbitrary as it may sound. The film, according to an explanatory note, was his attempt to embrace viewers with a contemporary visual language speaking most readily to them, in keeping with Wagner's theories of opera as an all-encompassing total work of art. The African and Asian cultural artifacts were attempts to find religious and mythological imagery still resonant in a secular age. But the giant rabbit, well, that's still anyone's guess." Jeremy Eichler, New York Times, 27 de Julho