Carmen et Error is a large-scale hybrid choreographic/vocal work which reprises Ovid's tragic aetion - or origin story - of the diving bird, an unfinished episode in the Metamorphoses.

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With dance legend Andrew Morrish as the complex figure of Aesacus, Carmen is a parable commemorating the revocation of Ovid's exile by Rome 2,000 years after he was banished by Emperor Augustus to a remote coastal town by the Black Sea in 8 AD. There, the broken poet lamented the reason for his exile as ‘a carmen et error’ (lit. a poem and a mistake).

 

With powerful parallels between life and fiction across two millenia, Carmen is therefore part of an ongoing story rooted in the freedom of artistic expression, contemporary diasporas of exile, and the radical palinodic power of ‘taking back’ or ‘unsaying’.

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When questioned by councillors why Rome City Council were revisiting Ovid’s exile order in 2017, Deputy Mayor Luca Bergman replied: “It is about the fundamental right of artists to express themselves freely in societies in which, around the world, the freedom of artistic expression is increasingly constrained.’

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Dante, the great Renaissance poet, was similarly pardoned in 2008 by Florence – from where he was exiled on pain of death in 1302.

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The attention drawn to both the liberal freedom of artistic expression and the condition of exile are very deep touchstones for a work such as Carmen that claims to do nothing other than describe the origin of a diving bird.

 

Moreover, the appeal of thinking history through the present, and rereading Ovid’s exile in 8 AD through the contemporary migrant crisis, is particularly powerful from the perspective of a ‘once-again-frightened Australia’ (as Anne Summers put it in her 2017 Kenneth Myers Oration).

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Ultimately, Carmen et Error presents these problems in cunning simplicity within a coastal Australian purgatory surveyed by a broken, comic and neurotic cormorant as he searches for hope among the Lethe's undead chorus.  

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