If you were a flutist Jed Wentz used to being on stage, but acting turned out to be something completely different. When you play an instrument, the audience is actually looking at something they can’t see: the music. “But when you act they look at your body. The first time was terrible.” Still, Wentz (1960) thought he should do it. As a music historian at Leiden University, he researches performance traditions of opera, voice art and text declamation, and trains himself in the techniques he finds in ancient sources. “But you have to experience the interaction with the audience, otherwise you can’t say anything about the effect of a technique or playing style.”
On Sunday Wentz will perform in the Luther Museum in Amsterdam with a program of melodramas and poetry from around 1900. He is accompanied by Artem Belogurov on pianoforte and Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde on cello. On Friday 27 May, a completely different program in which Wentz is involved in the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ: the screening of FW Murnau’s silent film Tartuff (1925) with live music by pianist Olga Pashchenko† Wentz composed the virtuoso score and provides the live sound effects: when someone knocks on a door on the screen, Wentz knocks on a piece of wood. He affectionately calls such effects “naive”: “Just because anything is possible on the screen these days, it’s wonderful to lose yourself in such a silent film.”
The melodrama concert in the Luther Museum bears the title The Pied Piper of Hamelin, but it is not a children’s concert, emphasizes Wentz. He will perform a melodrama with lyrics by poet Robert Browning, inspired by Grimm’s fairy tale, and poems by Walt Whitman, Lord Byron and Edgar Allen Poe. There is music by Schumann and Debussy, among others.
Overdone
Melodrama (music with narration) and silent film: they seem like very different sports, but Wentz explains that they are closely related. Both genres are rooted in a recital tradition that we nowadays quickly call ‘exaggerated’, or overacting: grand gestures, extreme facial expressions, carried declamation. Wentz: “It’s not for everyone and you don’t have to like it, but why has that way of playing worked for centuries? And why are we no longer open to it?”
Part of the answer to that question is our current visual culture. We are used to close-ups, different camera angles and fast editing. “Before the twentieth century, there was very different light, little visibility. As an actor, you had to have a big voice to reach your audience. There are detailed resources on pitch and custom speaking as an expressive tool. With specific facial expressions and gestures you conveyed emotions. It was a kind body hack: the trick was to let spectators really experience those emotions. We can no longer tolerate such sentimentality, or only if it is ironic, as with Brecht.”
Wentz takes the pretense of realism of the current acting style with a grain of salt. “If you study old sources you will read again and again that people think that there really is a naturalistic acting style. Acting today will also look dated in a few decades.”
Rhetoric
Wentz was born in the United States, in 1982 he moved to the Netherlands and since 1990 he has the Dutch nationality. His ambition is to help young people from all walks of life learn to speak: “You don’t have to read Aristotle and Quintillian, rhetoric is about speaking well, with a free voice. That is something for everyone, empowering people authentically.”
In December, Wentz will organize a three-day theater festival in Leiden for the first time, with the nickname Over acting, a collaboration with Leiden University and the Utrecht Early Music Festival, to which he is associated as an advisor.
Wentz tells an anecdote about the eighteenth-century actor Jan Punt, who was famous for a certain monologue: “When Punt had spoken his monologue, the audience stopped the music to recreate the scene themselves, they were so moved by it.” And that was exactly the point: “Those beautiful plays by Shakespeare or Racine are written with the aim of conveying strong emotion. There are tracts from the eighteenth century that describe how the emotion sometimes changes within a line. The public at the time understood that. It is a series of impressive techniques that you have to learn to read.”
While studying that technique, Wentz has benefited from silent films, which have preserved the last phase of the old acting tradition. “I’ve been looking at it intensively for ten years now and I’m still discovering new things.”
Luther Museum Amsterdam. Deklamatorium: the Pied Piper of Hamelin† 15/5. Music building in Amsterdam. Herr Tartuff with live music† 27/5.
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