Les Fleurs du Mal:
- The Thinking Man's Ritual Theatre -
presents:

THEREMINIAD

Karl-Heinz Wienerblut's interview with DJ NoMore (Sir David O'Clock; Ambiance21; WordCitizen; Laszlo Najmanyi), writer, composer and director of a multi-part Theremin-epoch

DJ NoMore
(Photo: Ray Charles White)

Les Fleurs du Mal, "The Thinking Man's Ritual Theater" (founded in New York, 1996) is a traveling troupe, dedicated to re-marry science and art, in the form of electronic rituals. They are presently on a tour of Europe, with their new show, THEREMINIAD. It is an electro-theatrical epoch, based on the lives and times of Russian scientist and spy, Professor Leon Theremin, inventor of the world's first space-controlled electronic music instrument, the theremin. The following interview was recorded in Vienna (Austria) and Budapest (Hungary), after the premiere performance of Clara & Leon, the sixth part of the THEREMINIAD epoch.

Karl-Heinz Wienerblut (KHW): When and how did you come across Professor Theremin and his magic instrument?

DJ NoMore (NM): I saw Professor Theremin's last koncert in New York, in the early 1990s, which gave me the last push to start thinking of staging his incredible life-story. Being a great Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin and Bela Lugosi fan I was already familiar with the sound of  the theremin by that time, and I knew some of the details of its inventor's enigmatic life, but I needed to experience him performing live, in order to get a boost of energy I was missing, for the serious research. He was one of the most charismatic performers I've ever seen on stage. He was playing duetts with Clara Rockmore, the greatest theremin virtuosa of all times. They did not appear as earthlings to me, at all. They were frail and ghostly, like projections from an old sci-fi movie. Yet there was this incredible spiritual energy, emanating from both. This mutual, obviously telephatic understanding between the two. Professor Theremin was 93 years old then, Clara Rockmore 83. They had to be helped up to the stage, but as soon as they took up their position behind their theremins, they've regained perfect controll of their bodies. The theremin is the instrument hardest to play, because you don't have any physical contact with it. You must stand perfectly still, while playing the theremin. The machine senses your body-movements. You controll the sound - both pitch, velocitiy and volume, - by slight movements of your fingers and hands, in the empty space, near two antennas. If your body waves just a fragment of an inch inadvertently, you are out of tune, lose controll of velocity and volume. You must sense space like a blind Shao Lin warrior is capable of, in order to become an acceptable theremin player. These two, elegant old people stood there, up on the stage, perfectly still for almost an hour, as they were releasing those etheric waves of sound, literarly from the thin air. I was taken in an instant.

Vilmos Vajdai as Professor Theremin
THEREMIN, an oratorio electronique
December 8-9-10, 2000, Hungarian Academy of Music, Budapest
(Photo: Daniel Garas, Computer Graphics: Ambiance 21)

KHW: Which aspects of Professor Theremin's life are you interested in?

NM: All of him. The artist, the scientist, the spy, the predator, the victim, the husband, the lover - all of his attributes, all those incredible parallel lives, which made up this extraordinary person. I think of him as the very metaphore of our 20th century. Deeper I dig into his life, more layers of mysteries I find. His story is a contemporary legend, full of holes, misleading information, fake documents, hearsay, rumors, false testimonies, dead end streets. It was mostly written (forged) by the world's once most resourceful intelligence service, the Russian, with consciderable assistance from other countries's similar organizations, let us not forget about it. We'll never learn the full truth about this remarkable man. The first piece I wrote about him was an oratorio electronique, titled Theremin. It premiered in December, 2000, at the Hungarian Academy of Music.

Alíz Krausz as Clara Rockmore
THEREMIN, an oratorio electronique
December 8-9-10, 2000, Hungarian Academy of Music, Budapest
(Photo: Moli)

The Theremin oratorio, a pretty straightforward narrative gave a general overview of Professor Theremin life-story. The music was composed for two theremins, human voices and an array of digital effects, which were controlled by motion-sensors.

Alíz Krausz as Clara Rockmore
THEREMIN, an oratorio electronique
December 8-9-10, 2000, Hungarian Academy of Music, Budapest
(Photo: Moli)

The theremins were played by dancers. They were moving at the front phosphorescent screens, on which midi-controlled flashlights fixed their silhuettes, at certain points in the music.

Miriam Rakotomalala as Lavinia Williams
THEREMIN, an oratorio electronique
December 8-9-10, 2000, Hungarian Academy of Music, Budapest
(Photo: Moli)

Miriam Rakotomalala as Lavinia Williams
THEREMIN, an oratorio electronique
December 8-9-10, 2000, Hungarian Academy of Music, Budapest
(Photo: Moli)

The dancers' movements triggered the digital sound-effects also, which, in turn shaped the sound. There was midi-controlled slide- and video projections of documentary pictures about the Bolshevik Revolution, intercut with 3D animated circuit drawings and African art (created by Adrian Costache and Ambiance21).

The second part of my THEREMINIAD series was a radio-documentary, which I wrote and co-directed (with Gabor Zsigmond Papp) for the Hungarian Radio, in 2001. Like the oratorio, it was also titled Theremin.

Vilmos Vajdai as Professor Theremin
THEREMIN, an oratorio electronique
December 8-9-10, 2000, Hungarian Academy of Music, Budapest
(Photo: Moli)

This piece was focused on Professor Theremin's love life, on his relationships with three women: his Russian wife, Vera Tyermenova, his American partner and lover, Clara Reisenberg-Rockmore, and his Afro-American wife, the Haitian born dancer, Lavinia Williams.

Alíz Krausz as Clara Rockmore
THEREMIN, an oratorio electronique
December 8-9-10, 2000, Hungarian Academy of Music, Budapest
(Photo: Moli)

Vilmos Vajdai as Professor Theremin
THEREMIN, an oratorio electronique
December 8-9-10, 2000, Hungarian Academy of Music, Budapest
(Photo: Istvan Csontos)

The third part of  THEREMINIAD, also titled THEREMINIAD premiered in 2005, at MU Theatre, also in Budapest, Hungary. It was staged in the form of a multi-media concert, which I performed live on theremin and other electronic music instruments, backed by an animated cartoon style video documentary (created by Ambiance21 and Adrian Costache) on Professor Theremin's scientific achievements, mixed with African style animations, which told the plight of his abandoned Afro-American wife, Lavinia Williams, intertwined with images of the horrors of Communist torture chambers and labor camps.

The fourth part of the series was titled TheReMix. It is a symphony electronique, which was composed for two theremins, human voices and electronics. It was first performed as part of the Big Ear Festival, in the summer of 2005, on ship A38, a floating concert hall on the river Danube, in Budapest.

Versions of the piece (under different work-titles) were played at the Gigazone festival (DJ NoMore, Millenaris Theatre, Budapest, 2005), at the BassCulture festival (BassCulture, MU Theatre, Budapest, 2005), and at the Reactivism Conference, Sonic Tags Festival (ThereminTime, Akku Museum of Electrotechnics, Budapest, 2005).

Remix Africana was the THEREMINIAD series's fifth part. Les Fleurs du Mal staged the piece at Süss Fel Nap (Let The Sun Rise), a popular Budapest nightclub. It was an hour long, multi media show. Two live theremin's sounds were mixed to computer-generated backing tracks, in addition to projected computer animations, consisting of 3D electric circuit animations, moving barbed wire compositions, intermixed with  stilized pictures of Clara Rockmore and Leon Theremin, and with still and moving images of Communist horror.

DJ NoMore as Baron Samedi
Remix Africana
November 28, 2005
Süss Fel Nap, Budapest, Hungary
(Photo: Andrea Nehéz, szinhaz.hu)

The projections were created by Adrian Costache and Ambiance21. The show was an electronic voodoo ceremony. The only difference between a traditional voodoo ritual and our theatre performance was that we were using digital effects for purification purposes (and for casting spells), instead of chicken blood. Vilmos Vajdai, the co-composer of the piece played the Russian scientist, Szilvia Nagy danced Lavinia William's role. I played the voudoun caretaker of graveyards, Baron Samedi. It was a hommage to the great afro-american dancer, Lavinia Williams, late star of the Negro Ballet of New York, second wife of Professor Leon Theremin, to whom the scientist has created his second-generation virtual drum-set, the advanced Rhythmicon. She was born in Haiti and moved with her family to the States in her early childhood. She was already a rising star of the emerging modern black dance-culture, when she married the inventor in 1937, in New York City.

DJ NoMore as Baron Samedi
Remix Africana
November 28, 2005
Süss Fel Nap, Budapest, Hungary
(Photo: Andrea Nehéz, szinhaz.hu)

Shortly after their marriage Professor Theremin was kidnapped by Russian agents. He was  smuggled back to the Soviet Union, where he was sent to the Gulag, for 13 years. He was not allowed to contact his American wife, even after his release from the labor-camp.

Voodoo Ritual
Animation by Ambiance21, part of the background projection
Remix Africana
November 28, 2005, Süss Fel Nap, Budapest, Hungary

Les Fleurs du Mal presents the dancer's life as a Haitian street-legend. Lavinia Williams spent 30 years on trying to find her husband, to no avail. After giving up search in the 1970s, she moved back to Haiti and started a dance school on the island. She took one of the Professor's main invention, the Rhytmicon with her. It was a further developed version of the drum machine, with the same name, which the inventor constructed in 1930, to the request of composer Henry Cowell. Lavinia's custom-made electronic device provided a set of virtual drums. The drummers played on them by hitting certain spots (each assigned to a different drum sound) in the air, within the vicinity of the equipment's sensors. She had local drummers playing the  invisible drums, during her dance classes.

DJ NoMore as Baron Samedi,Vilmos Vajdai as Professor Theremin
Remix Africana
November 28, 2005
Süss Fel Nap, Budapest, Hungary
(Photo: Andrea Nehéz, szinhaz.hu)

She was island-wide respected as the enbodiment of Ezili (Erzulie), the female spirit of love in the voudoun religion. Lavinia Williams's dance-school soon became a center of resistance against the Duvalier dictatorship, which ruled Haiti in that time. The dictator, Francois 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, was a practicing voodoo magician. Always dressing in black, wearing a black top hat Papa Doc was impersonating Baron Samedi, the Death demon in the voudoun Pantheon, to make himself feared by the superstitious masses. He had Lavinia Williams poisoned.

Francois 'Papa Doc' Duvalier
(Photo: dagbladet.no)

After Lavinia's death, the dictator had the invisible drums brought over to his palace, where he used the machine during his bloody voodoo orgies. His son, Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier inherited the instrument, after his murderous dad died. When the Duvaliers fell from power, Baby Doc had to escape from the island, on an American war plane. He took two things with him, to cushion his exile: the Haitian state treasure and the Rhytmicon. He took up residence in the French Riviera, where he lives in luxury ever since. Baby Doc rarely leaves his fortified villa. He spends most of his time playing on the virtual drums, in the voodoo temple, deep beneath his mansion, in the armored cellar.

The sixth part of the series, Clara & Leon, which we also staged at Süss Fel Nap, in Budapest, on February 27, 2006. It is an electro-theatrical exploration of Professor Theremin's relationship with Clara Reisenberg-Rockmore, the greatest theremin virtuosa of all times. My co-composer, Vilmos Vajdai played the role of Professor Theremin, Eva Sandor danced the part of Clara Rockmore, and I did Bob Moog.

Éva Sándor as Clara Rockmore
Clara & Leon
February 27, 2006, Süss Fel Nap, Budapest, Hungary
(Photo: Adrian Costache)

This multi-media ritual is composed of four segments, connected by narration. My Internet-based approximation of the Theremin-story goes like this: Professor Leon Theremin and his invention, "The music instrument you don't have to touch in order to make it sound" arrived to New York in 1927. The scientist was invited to America by Clara Reisenberg and her wealthy family. She was an aspiring violin player. Her hands were partially paralized by a disease, she couldn't play the violin anymore. She was hoping, that Professor Theremin's invention can resurrect her artistic carrier. Her wish came true. She mastered theremin playing in a short time and became a celebrated star of the future-instrument for the rest of her life.

Vilmos Vajdai as Professor Theremin
Clara & Leon
February 27, 2006, Süss Fel Nap, Budapest, Hungary
(Photo: Adrian Costache)

A long time agent of the Russian intelligence service, Professor Theremin came to America with a double task. He was to propagate the superiority of Soviet science, and also, he was to secretly collect information on prominent American artists, scientists, politicians and military personel, whom he befriended as he was quickly found his way into the heart of High Society. Albert Einstein, Leopold Stockowski, Arturo Toscanini, Charlie Chaplin and Dwight Eisenhower were among his closest friends. He dutifully reported to Moscow on all. According to some sources he had a long range radio transmitter built into his theremin, which he was using to contact his NKVD superiors, in Russia.

He was spying on his closest collaborator and lover, the Lithuanian emigrant Clara Reisenberg too. He taped their conversations and Clara's frequent emotional outbursts, on a tape-recorder (the world's first such equipment) he constructed in his New York laboratory. He's planted a bugging device into the theremin he custom-built for Clara. Some say that it was Bob Moog, the inventor of the synthetizer, who accidentally found the bug in the instrument, as he was replacing a burned out vacuum tube, to the request of Clara Rockmore, long after the Professor was kidnapped from New York and was secretly taken back to Moscow, by Russian agents. Clara suspected that her friend and saviour was spying for the Russians, but she did not know that the inventor was reporting on her, too.

Éva Sándor as Clara Rockmore, DJ No More as Bob Moog, Vilmos Vajdai as Professor Theremin
Clara & Leon
February 27, 2006, Süss Fel Nap, Budapest, Hungary
(Photo: Adrian Costache)

After Professor Theremin has disappeared from New York, Clara Rockmore, and the scientist's wife, Lavinia Williams were desperatelly trying to find him for decades, to no avail. Even Clara's American governmental contact couldn't help locate the kidnapped celebrity. The Russian authorities refused to give information on his where-abouts. As I said earlier, the inventor was found guilty of anti-Soviet propaganda and he was sent to the Gulag, to a labor camp, in Siberia, for 13 years. Even after his release from the camp, in 1951, he was not allowed to keep contact with foreigners, until the system-change in Russia, in 1990. After his release from nearly four decades of house arrest, his American friends brought him to New York, with great fanfare.

His Afro-American wife, Lavinia Williams was dead by that time. So was his abandoned Russian wife, Vera Tyermenova. After 53 years, Professor Theremin met with Clara Rockmore again and he did confess his snitching on her, over half a century ago.  He was 93 years old, Clara ten years younger at their reunion. Clara easily forgave her old friend's treason. The Professor surprised her with a present, which he's brought from Moscow for her: a bottle of Clara's favourite Russian perfume. Shortly after their concert at the Radio City Music Hall, Professor Theremin died of a massive heart attack, while walking on Mott street, in Little Italy.

Éva Sándor as Clara Rockmore
Clara & Leon
February 27, 2006, Süss Fel Nap, Budapest, Hungary
(Photo: Adrian Costache)

Clara survived her friend by five years. On the day of her funeral, Clara's sister Nadia Reisenberg has found a miniature, but extremly powerful listening device, built into the silver top of the perfume bottle, which Professor Theremin gave to Clara at their reunion party. Nadia Reisenberg gave the bug to the family-friend Bob Moog, who forwarded it to the American authorities, after extensively examining its circuitry. Moog was amazed by the technical sophistication of the device. He had no doubt that it was constructed and planted personally by the father of Russian bugging industry, the Professor himself. Yet he couldn't fathom, why on Earth would the present day Russian intelligence services would be interested in the private life of an old lady, who had no contacts to the High Society anymore.

KHW: It is a maze of a story. It makes me dizzy.

NM: The life of Professor Theremin is a superstructure of overlaying, interconnected, dark labirynths. It is definitelly not for weak hearted explorers. Facts and fiction are interchangeable, with no consequences in his surrealistic bio. To present the story in it's full complexity, to show these overlapping layers clearly we have to stick to minimalism, both in acting, dancing, music and also in visuality. The dancers dance with their frozen-in-time silhuettes, at the front of flashlights-lit phosphorescent screens. The background projection (created by Adrian Costache and Edua Dobos) is a collage of vintage documentary movies and computer-animated barbed wire. The music is based on drum & bass and hip hop rhythm tracks, over which we float theremins-generated, digitally effected walls of sound.

KHW: Why do you prefer to first show your works in Europe, particularly in Hungary? Wouldn't Professor Theremin's saga be more at home on a New York stage?

NM: I spent the dark years of my youth in Hungary, until the Communist authorities kicked me and my friends out of the country, for forming the first punk band (SPIONS) of the late Eastern Block, in 1978. I like this place, because it is still changing, not as complete, finished, polished and packaged as New York, or London is. It is a rough terrain though, a kind of Mad Max's land, totally chaotic. But chaos can bring out surprises, which order rarely allows. This is my theater's practice ground. The audience is overly sincere and very responsive here. They are as far from the New York cool as humanly possible. They give me clear signals of the weak points of the show. In other places well developed social conventions tend to restrain people from expressing themselves. There are no social conventions here, so to speak. Half a century of Communist dictatorship took care of that. My hometown (if there is any) is still New York, but my playground right now is Budapest.

KHW: What are your future plans with your THEREMINIAD project?

NM: The seventh, last part of the series, titled Tiger Lily will premier on June 21, 2006, at the Ludwig Museum, in Budapest. This is the story of Vera Tyermenova, Professor Theremin's first, Russian wife. She was a Futurist poet and theatre artist originally. She was involved with the young artists' circle  around the revolutionary poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky. She accompanied her husband on his concert tour of Europe, then on his voyage to America, in 1927. She felt lonely and neglected in New York. Professor Theremin was too busy with concerts, with his new inventions, with his love affair with Clara Rockmore, and with his candlestine activities. He had no time for his pretty, moody wife. Longing for company, for some tenderness and understanding, Vera joined a Russian cult, headquartered in Brighton Beach, New York. They were followers of the last Tzarina's spiritual mentor and closest friend, Grigoriy Yefimovitch Rasputin. Rasputin taught purification through sin. His followers worshipped by getting drunk and engaging in week long orgies. When the Russian secret service learned about Vera Tyermenova's involvement with the banned Rasputinist sect, they ordered Professor Theremin to divorce her. The scientist has obeyed the order. He had Vera move out of their apartment, to a rented walk-up, in the East Village, gave her some money, then he's cut communication. They've never seen each other again. During the war years Vera Tyermenova worked in an ammunitions factory. After the war she moved to a farm, near Manitoac, Wisconsin, with her religious congregation. She became an animal caretaker. She no longer wrote poetry or dreamed of modernist theatre. She learned horse riding and performed stunts on horseback, at county fairs, instead. She had two children, fathered by her priest, Father Fiodor. She married the manager of a traveling circus. The circus needed an animal trainer. Vera took the job and began working with Siberian tigers. She took up the stage name Tiger Lily. Dressed in a tiger skin bikini, she used to ride two white tigers on stage. Vera Tyermenova died in 1989, just a year before Professor Theremin came back to New York, for his last show. Her sons, Duane and Leon traveled to Russia and threw their mother's ashes in a stream, near the village of Prokovskoie, where the staretz Rasputin was born.  The  role of Professor Theremin will be danced by  Atilla Gergely,  as of  Vera Tyermenova  by  Éva  Sándor.  The creator of the video-projections is my long-time collaborator, Adrian Costache.

Atfter staging the seventh part, I am planning to remix the THEREMINIAD series to a three parts, 3-4 hours long electronic opera, which would incorporate the main elements of the epoch. I hope to premier this final result of 16 years of my Theremin-research in Moscow, in 2007. After the Russian premiere we'll take the Theremin opera on a tour of Europe, playing at the stations of Professor Theremin's 1927 concert-tour: Milan, Rome, Vienna, Salzburg, Berlin, Frankfurt - ending the tour in Paris. We are going to employ five tube-theremins in the orchestration, and also a technically perfected replica of Professor Theremin's invention, the motion-sensing stage (TerpsiTone), which converts the dancers' movements to music. We are working on the reconstruction of his virtual drum set, the Rhytmicon. I want to fully automate the show, using space controlled light-effects and projections, so both sound and vision could be created real-time, on-stage, by the performers.  

Vienna - Budapest, March, 2006

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