Sonica: Remember Me @ Scotland Street School Museum

Considered by certain individuals to be a hive of paranormal activity, the perfectly preserved corridors of Mackintosh’s Scotland Street School are an intelligent setting for Claudia Molitor’s haunting explorations. Regardless of your take on matters occult, the place is drenched in history - there’s no ignoring those lost, lingering voices.

Such voices are the basic premise behind Remember Me, albeit those of the ancients. Molitor’s piece attempts to grant two operatic heroines, Dido and Eurydice, a voice outside of their respective stories by detailing an imaginary friendship between the two. The work tries to deconstruct the grand, masculine concepts that characterise opera by scaling down the epic designs and cutting up its narratives.

It’s a very literal process. Molitor’s opera, complete with stage, performers, and orchestra pit, fits into an antique writing desk gifted to her by her grandmother - the only space, as Molitor suggests, that a young woman in the early 20th century may have been able to call her own. In the mini refreshment break, Molitor hands out Turkish delight before immediately resuming her performance, a quiet mixture of visuals, storytelling, movement and sound.

It’s an ambitious piece, but whilst certainly captivating, the wider feminine narratives hinted at throughout are never convincingly evoked. Part of this is down to Remember Me’s overly rigid structure, a series of loosely related movements around and within the desk, performed to a prerecorded mixture of found sounds and delicate, modern composition. Some of the more interesting moments involve the contact microphones taped to Molitor’s fingers, but these aside, there is little spontaneous interaction.  

This, and Molitor’s overtly personal relationship to the work, prevents it from conveying much beyond her own story. There’s much here to admire, in particular the composition – perhaps the only problem lies in promising too much. [Jean-Xavier Boucherat]