A Golden Lion to remember

A critique of climate change and of the leisure industry doesn’t sound very now, just now. Our concerns have not advanced but they have moved elsewhere.

Just a few months ago the performance artwork Sun & Sea (Marina) was the hot number: the talk of the art world and winner of the best pavilion at the Venice Biennale, picking up the original and best Leone d’Oro, golden lion. It combined a sharply satirical edge with a joyousness about the human need for shared, close, social display, all underpinned by a strong statement about global issues.

While our concerns have moved on, the format and the subject of this original take on opera may hold new resonance. There was a warning about catastrophe around the corner lurking in the piece and it has come to pass in a way few, if any of us, envisaged. 

The work is an opera with a difference, music with a libretto performed by around 24 participants who occupy an artificial beach that is the stage for their closely compacted beach activities. They sing of environmental challenges and impending disaster, among other things.

First shown in Lithuania in 2017, the work was adapted into English for the Biennale. It was devised by theatre director Rugile Barzdziukaite, playwright Vaiva Grainyte, and composer Lina Lapelyte.

“In this piece, we draw a line between the fragility of the human body and the fragility of the earth,” said Barzdziukaite at the time the work was awarded the Lion for the best pavilion. 

That fragility of humanity needs no restatement today. It is the ferocious forces behind the fragile face of nature, though, that might be more the point. 

A beach packed with bodies, people doing the beach-y things… fear rather than fun is triggered by every close contact on display. Versions of Sun & Sea (Marina) could be installed now, in the centre of major cities, as an explicit warning of what not to do this summer. It is no longer loosely conceptual, it is a stark warning.