The Surprising Transcendence of Adam’s Passion
What can happen when you make just one simple change to a familiar story? This is how I found out.
In the early 1990s, when I was a teenager, the music of Arvo Pärt (Estonian, b. 1935) was a drug I used to escape the confines of the small Kansas town and the religious community that owned me. While hitching rides to Kansas State to study organ (a yet untold story), I bought Arvo Pärt CDs from a record store near the university and played them over and over. Immersed in the music, I imagined launching out into the infinity of space where constructs like subjugation and the unbearable dragging of time in captivity did not exist.
I lost track of Pärt’s work as I entered adulthood. My obsession with transcendence gave way to the need for survival in the real world, for which my sequestered religious upbringing had ill-prepared me, so I am only now discovering the 2015 world premiere of Adam’s Passion. A collaboration between Arvo Pärt and stage director Robert Wilson (American, b.1941), Adam’s Passion features just one piece composed specifically for it, Sequentia (2014), and repurposes older Pärt musical works Adam’s Lament (2009), Tabula Rasa (1977), and Misere (1989).
Adam’s Passion is often categorized as an opera, though all the sound comes from the orchestra and chorus, not the performers on stage. The characters on stage perform only movement. Robert Wilson is known for work that defies the constructs of time, and performers are often in slow motion, and in Adam’s passion, most of the motion is slow motion. As the overture softly begins, you can already feel a sense of leaving space and time.
It is several minutes before the figure of Adam appears on stage, facing away from the audience. At first, you see only his naked silhouette against a backdrop of Heavenly light as clouds swirl around his feet. He holds his tense right arm out to the side. His other arm bent at the elbow, he holds a rough, soft-ball-sized chunk of rock in his left hand. Several minutes more pass before Adam begins to move, and it’s hard to be certain when that movement begins.
As Adam slowly turns to face the audience, he grasps the rock as if contemplating the ground on which he stands. Then, as if in a sudden realization, he opens his hand and lets the rock fall.
He moves away from the main stage and out into the audience on a long platform extending at a right angle from the middle. At the end of this long walkway, a broken-off piece of a tree branch with a few green leaves lies on the ground.
The “slow motion” choreography leaves what seems like vast time and space to think about Adam. I was transfixed, frozen in time, listening to Arvo Pärt ’s composition “Adam’s Lament.” I watched him move toward that branch over what was–I checked later — the next 20 minutes.
During those 20 minutes, my mind wandered to the “original sin” story as my mother and early teachers impressed it upon me. Despite the extreme nature of my religious upbringing, the story I heard over and over again is likely very similar to the way almost every child born into Christianity hears it. After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve realize for the first time that they are naked and sew fig leaves together to cover themselves. That part of the story is normally over in the throw-away delivery of a sentence or two, and those moments between Adam and Eve’s sin and their expulsion from Eden go mostly unexplored. Robert Wilson suspends you within those few moments for nearly half an hour.
As I watched the figure of Adam (Michalis Theophanous in the world premiere), I could sense Adam’s racing thoughts through the subtle movements of his naked body: the blinking of his eyes, a change in his breathing, the subtle expression of his face, the barely perceptible twitch of a muscle, the trembling of an outstretched hand. As he moved ever so slowly, I could even think back to his motions several minutes ago, like the abrupt motion of his hand as he let go of the chunk of rock. I then understood the gesture of a man whose connection to this place and his sense of identity in it is gone forever.
It’s not just the slow motion and the time you have with the choreography and the music that makes this telling of the Biblical story different. Perhaps the most subversive element is the omission of Eve. I expected her to appear at any moment, but she never did. From what I can tell, there is not even one allusion to Eve throughout the production.
In my extreme conservative upbringing, the couple Adam and Eve represented the founding moment of divinely enforced heteronormativity and expectations around coupling and reproducing. Telling the story with just one person dispenses with all of that. It also dispenses with the levity around Adam’s blaming of Eve, which has given many a parish priest an easy laugh from his congregation, who are meant to see it as equivalent to a modern married couple’s argument.
There is no levity here. With Eve removed, your focus must go to the desperate pain of one human being facing the end of everything he has ever known. Robert Wilson takes you outside your normal perception of time to make sure you feel it.
Feel it I did. I watched naked, vulnerable Adam, desperate to cover himself but afraid to approach the branch on the ground at the end of the long walkway, let alone pick it up. As he finally comes close to the branch, two figures enter from the sides of the stage behind him. Like asteroids hurtling through space, they spin chaotically as he tries to muster the courage to gird himself with something, anything. In one of the few moments in which Adam breaks from his slow motion, he gives a determined wave of his hand. With this gesture, he seems to succeed in calming his frantic internal dialogue and thus the spinning of the dancers on stage, who then disappear into the wings.
Even then, as he finally attempts to take the branch, Adam briefly staggers backward and hesitates before lunging forward to pick it up.
When I was a child, I imagined (as all children of Christian conservative parents probably do) that Adam and Eve covered their genitalia when they realized they were naked. That is what all of the religious illustrations of my childhood led me to believe. That is our core understanding of what nakedness is. But here, Adam slowly, carefully, balances the branch on top of his head.
This again turns the oft-told story on its head in that it no longer reinforces constructs around sexual shame, removing yet another element that might distract from Adam’s terror and pain. Additionally, there is something pure and childlike about Adam covering his head and leaving his genitalia exposed that drives home the unimaginable cruelty of this story. Adam now represented for me everyone I have ever seen experience a disproportionate consequence they could not have fully understood beforehand and would have done anything to undo if it were only possible. I saw many of my own experiences growing up as a child under extreme religious conservatism.
God, a white-haired feminine figure in a futuristic gown, slowly enters the stage behind Adam, who still stands with his back to the stage. With no Eve, no couple’s argument, no reminders of body or sexual shame, my focus was squarely on Adam standing naked and vulnerable in the middle of the audience and God holding absolute power over him. Adam raises his hands to the branch as if to ensure it is securely in place before he meets God.
As God orders Adam out of Paradise, two more celestial figures appear just long enough to show their approval of God’s cruelty, then wash their hands of Adam even as he seems to gesture toward them. The first time I watched him remove the branch from his head and slowly descend from view below the screen at the back of the stage, my heart broke for the Adam, created to be curious, full of desires, and far from perfect, then punished for being as he was created.
But that was just my first reaction. I read far more strength and intentional defiance into Adam’s gestures on subsequent watchings. What you think that defiance says about the character of Adam and what it means for the story might depend on your personal beliefs about God and religion.
In the second half, I’m sure the stage is not really overcrowded or too busy, nor does it contain too many surrealist props. As incredible as the music is, the second half of the production just seemed unnecessary after the power of the first. I’ve watched the entire production several times, and my feelings about the second half do not seem to change. Still, the story continues after God expels Adam from Eden.
Adam is fully clothed when he first appears in the second half and has traded his tree branch for a full-sized ladder prop. He seems to stand in for all of humankind’s desire for re-ascendence to its former state in the Garden of Eden. But Humanity can never quite rise to the level of its aspiration. When I was a child and young adult, my parents and teachers told me to meditate on the Passion of the Christ, but this is the Passion of Adam: he sees humanity in hundreds of years of striving, suffering, guilt, and self-hatred. God remains front and center on the stage as Adam witnesses humanity’s pain.
In the final scene, a group of black-robed figures fills the stage in a slow-motion procession, each carrying a branch similar to the one Adam placed on his head at the beginning of the production. It seems that humanity, even generations removed from Adam’s original sin, is destined to passively accept the mark of his shame.
But Adam turns away from these visions and looks upward into the light above.
I can never be certain how much of the meaning I perceive in art is the artist’s intention and how much of my understanding comes from my own artistic mind. This work affected me so powerfully that I wanted to try resolving some of that by learning more about the artists. Even though I have such a long history with Arvo Pärt’s music, I hadn’t seen much about him as a person until now. I rented the documentary “The Lost Paradise” about the making of Adam’s Passion.
A clip in the trailer for “The Lost Paradise” shows Arvo Pärt saying, “We have a direct link to Adam. We may not have an exact picture of it, how it really was, but it was a cosmic catastrophe. But there is a way out of everything.”
I immediately loved that quote and wrote it down, as I felt it encapsulated what I took away from Adam’s Passion. In the full documentary, however, I found that the trailer had taken the quote out of context. Pärt goes on to talk about how the “way out” lies in religious ideas about the necessity of self-flagellation that are all too familiar to me.
There is another scene in the documentary in which Arvo Pärt tells the story of Adam to a room full of people seated around a table for a meeting at the Vatican. As he describes how Adam attempted to blame Eve, a familiar soft laughter ripples through the room. The way that Pärt tells in his 2009 composition Adam’s Lament seems very different than the story I see in his collaborative work with Robert Wilson.
The documentary portrays Pärt as still living very much in the world of religious judgment I so often used his music to escape. I tried to imagine what Pärt would say if I told him that I am a lifelong fan for whom his music represents an escape pod to a godless cosmic infinity. He doesn’t seem to have any intention of using art to help anyone get away from religion. But this does nothing to diminish the almost transcendent beauty of his work or my love for it. Artists are often mere conduits for messages we might understand if only a human lifetime could last an extra 50 or 100 years. Arvo Pärt will always be a link between the religious oppression of my childhood and the rational atheism of my adulthood, both of which make me who I am.
On the other hand, if I started a conversation with Robert Wilson about Adam’s Passion, that might go very differently, assuming he was willing to speak about it in detail. Looking for more information about his background and how it might have informed this work, I discovered that, like me, he grew up in an oppressive religious environment. He doesn’t seem to hold extremist conservative beliefs now if he ever did. He speaks publicly about being gay.
In the documentary, a press member asks Wilson about having created a work with religious themes. As Pärt sits nearby, Wilson avoids the question by stating that this material is spiritual, not religious, and that the theatre is no place for politics. I interpret this to mean that theatre is no place to encode provocative statements about religion and social constructs. Having seen Adam’s Passion, I find it difficult to believe that Wilson believes this, or maybe I just don’t want to believe that he does.
As Pärt’s “Miserere” fades, bringing the performance of “Adam’s Passion” to an end, the stage darkens, and the audience applauds. Most of the lights go out. Adam’s upturned gaze and a glass of water in God’s right hand are the only brightly illuminated points left.
I have read reviews and summaries of Adam’s Passion that suggest Adam finds redemption in the end by returning to God’s love and light, but that’s another thing I don’t want to believe.
I see Adam in this story as finding transcendence, not redemption. He finds peace not from seeking forgiveness within the narrative of his fall as we know it but from creating a new narrative, perhaps within the understanding of his human nature. A being created to be fallible in the perfect conditions of Eden can only be more fallible under struggle, deprivation, violence, and Death’s relentless approach. Adam no longer carries a branch, unlike the robed figures around him in the final scene.
Maybe the glass of water in God’s hand says not that we must go to God as the One with the power to nourish the forest of humanity but that old archetypes withhold redemption only because we let them hold power over us. As long as we do, the suffering continues.
I still agree with Arvo Pärt when he says there is a way out of everything. Completely forgetting the old archetypes doesn’t necessarily work, though. I hold reminders of my own past religious indoctrination close, even though I’ve long rejected what I was raised to believe they represent. I still visit old churches. I still listen to sacred music. You can’t flip the script unless you actually have the script.
Adam’s Passion seems to understand the concept of flipping the script. It doesn’t tell just one story but invites examination of the stories we tell and why we tell them. What if we stop mindlessly repeating narratives that frame human desire for knowledge, freedom, and self-expression as failures and instead look at who might be using these stories to enforce exploitative definitions of what a human should be? We might just transcend by creating fresh narratives in which we nourish, forgive, and create ourselves anew.
