イメルダ／ディスコ（by David Byrne） - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

Hannah Ellis-Petersen “David Byrne musical Here Lies Love charts rise and fall of Imelda Marcos” http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/sep/26/david-byrne-musical-here-lies-love-imelda-marcos

元比律賓のファースト・レディ、イメルダ・マルコス *1の生涯を描いたミュージカルHere Lies Love*2の英国初演に因んだデヴィッド・バーン *3へのインタヴュー記事。
冒頭、いきなりデヴィッド・バーンは「ミュージカルが好きじゃない」ことが語られる；

David Byrne is not a fan of musicals. In fact, the former Talking Heads frontman, says he avoids “the whole singing style associated with musicals” at all costs. “I just don’t like it very much,” Byrne adds, laughing.

何故イメルダ・マルコスの生涯を採り上げたのか；

Discussing the reason he chose Marcos, the polarising widow of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, known for her vast collection of shoes, as his unlikely musical muse, Byrne said her embodiment of the excesses and indulgences of power had drawn him to her story.
“I knew that Imelda was given to memorable pronouncements and aphorisms and outrageous behaviour, some of it amusing and some of it horrific,” he said.
“But the fact that she immersed herself in the disco club world was a big selling point.
“When I heard she had a giant mirror ball in her New York townhouse and turned the roof of the palace in Manila into a dancing club, I thought ‘she really surrounded herself with this music and created her own soundtrack to her life.’ Disco was a genre that I was uncomfortable with but keen to explore, so with those factors in mind I thought, ‘let’s see if there’s a story to be told here’.”

「ディスコ」はこのミュージカルの最重要の鍵言葉になるのだけれど、ここでも「ディスコ」は嫌いだと言っている。
「ディスコ」とマルコス政権との共通性について；

“The mindset of the Marcos regime and the mindset of disco music to me doesn’t seem all that distant. The hedonistic, escapist feeling of losing yourself and being transported to another world, like you feel on the dance floor and like you feel in a dance club, that’s a means to divorce yourself from the rest of the world, just as Imelda did.
“When you’re dancing, you’re in this psychological and sonic bubble, in the same way that powerful people create a bubble around themselves. So I wanted to give an audience a taste of that feeling.”

イメルダへの感情移入可能性について；

“In the first half, when the play is dealing with her childhood, her upbringing and her meeting with Ferdinand Marcos, it’s meant to get the audience to empathise with her and understand what’s driving her and then they’ll understand how that manifests later on,” he said.
“And it’s kind of frightening because in most cases, not every night but in most cases, in the scene when the Marcoses get elected, you have the whole audience cheering them on.
“Occasionally I’ve had Filipinos in the audience coming up to me afterwards and saying ‘I didn’t feel really good doing that, knowing what’s coming later’. But the Marcoses were really popular to begin with and this really mirrors that. I didn’t want to subvert the image of Imelda completely, more get inside of her head. She probably won’t agree, but I wanted to understand a little bit of what made her do those things and how it’s possible to get into that corrupt position.”

このミュージカルの作曲はファットボーイ・スリム（ノーマン・クック）*4と共同で行われているが、ファットボーイ・スリムを巡って；

“When I realised that I wanted the whole show to be a medium for dance music I went to Norman Cook to see if he could help out in that department” said Byrne.
“I was a fan and I thought that his stuff had a real range to it, it’s not all techno or one kind of beat, and he was in a band at one point so he understands there is such a thing as a song.”

歌詞について；

Lyrics in Here Lies Love were often lifted directly from speeches, interviews, recordings from the time and even Marcos’s high school yearbook. One song is taken verbatim from a speech that Benigno Aquino gave about President Marcos building arts centres and not doing enough for the shanty towns in Manila, while another is based on quotes from an oral history of the People Power revolution that Byrne stumbled across.
The title of the musical comes from Imelda’s self-proposed epitaph.

勿論当のイメルダもこのミュージカルのことを知っているということ；

Marcos, 83, is back in the Philippines as a congresswoman, and two of her children are also in national office. Marcos is also aware of the musical (she was reportedly “flattered” when she heard the songs). Byrne admits that, while he can’t really stop anyone from coming to see it, he said “a group photo with Imelda and me and the cast all together would be really unfortunate for us”.

デヴィッド・バーンの著書『ちゃりんこ日記』にもフィリピン紀行は含まれており（pp.132-166）、その殆どはイメルダ・マルコス関連の言及に費やされている。これは、このプロジェクトのための取材旅行だったわけだね。

Bicycle Diaries

作者: David Byrne
出版社/メーカー: Penguin (Non-Classics)
発売日: 2010/09/28
メディア: ペーパーバック
クリック: 16回
この商品を含むブログ (4件) を見る

ところで、 Here Lies Loveは先ず2010年にCDとしてリリースされている*5。そして、2013年にミュージカル化された。また、今年の４月にはミュージカルのキャストが歌うヴァージョンのCDがリリースされたという*6。2010年の最初のCDには、ヴォーカリストとして、例えばナタリー・マーチャント、トーリ・エイモス *7、シンディ・ローパー *8などが参加していたのだった。

*1:Mentioned in http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20091203/1259847415

*2:See http://www.davidbyrne.com/archive/here_lies_love/

*4:http://fatboyslim.net/ See eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Cook http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%95%E3%82%A1%E3%83%83%E3%83%88%E3%83%9C%E3%83%BC%E3%82%A4%E3%83%BB%E3%82%B9%E3%83%AA%E3%83%A0

*5:See http://www.davidbyrne.com/archive/here_lies_love/music.php

*6:“Nonesuch to release cast recording of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s Here Lies Love musical” http://www.factmag.com/2014/04/10/cast-recording-of-here-lies-love-david-byrne-fatboy-slim-musical/