Performance
Wings of Desire, Paisley Abbey
Three stars
LOGISTICS be damned. For one night only and with Wim Wenders’ 1987 paean to Berlin at its heart, Paisley’s 12th-century abbey is host to an evening of music, fire, film and aerial artistry, its ancient stones lit scarlet and its columns reverberating variously to ultra-low bass hum, a thousand voices interweaving and the upper registers of the young choristers of the abbey.
The evening begins with that low-end drone, an angel perched on a trapeze as the audience filters in from the moonlit fire garden, the church washed blood-red. The angel descended, experimental music collective Tut Vu Vu introduce ebbing waves of analogue synthesizer, the hum now an insistent pulse. A theremin issues a klaxon call as spotlights sweep, the sound building to a state of unholiness at odds with the surroundings.
Rodolfo Rivas Franco writhes among silk ribbons suspended from the ceiling to a cabaret croon, the abbey’s red-cassocked choristers emerge, issuing a shrill, wordless accompaniment to Tut Vu Vu’s serpentine guitar figure, a glittering Lauren Agnew ascends upon the trapeze for an extraordinary display as a Balkan-flavoured fairground motif plays out below. Artist Kathryn Elkin leads the 16 choristers in a piece inspired by an influence on Wings of Desire, the poet Rainer Maria Wilke, before Tut Vu Vu and Lauren Jamieson deliver a powerful finale that merges piano loops, multi-layered speech, piercing choral drone and spiralling aerial performance.
Besides the buttock-numbing effects of sitting on a pew for almost three hours, the screening of Wings of Desire is the evening’s biggest disappointment. Granted, it’s the seam from which the evening’s mostly exceptional collaborations have been mined, but such a refreshing preamble only serves to highlight the fact the film is, ironically in the context of the evening's programme, overlong and ponderous.
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