Dancing with Titian imagine...

This programme contains some strong language.

Just days before the Olympics open in East London,

a crowd has gathered in Trafalgar Square,

to watch one of the highlights of the London 2012 festival.

I've witnessed many art events over the years,

but I can honestly say, this is one of the most ambitious

I've ever come across.

It's not just bold, at times it's bordering on crazy.

'We're watching the finale of an unprecedented collaboration

'between the Royal Ballet and the National Gallery,

'which brings together a dizzying multitude of art forms.'

There's three contemporary artists, including two Turner Prize winners,

Chris Ofili and Mark Wallinger, and rising star, Conrad Shawcross.

They're working with three composers,

one of them the very hip Nico Muhly.

Then there's the seven choreographers.

Among them, Wayne McGregor and over 50 dancers,

including the most famous of his generation, Carlos Acosta.

There's also new work

from pretty much every major poet you can think of.

Among them, the Nobel prize winner, Seamus Heaney.

Getting that many egos to collaborate on a single project

was tough and potentially disastrous,

but all these creative talents have united,

to pay homage to a single painter, one of the all-time greats, Titian.

'For the first time in centuries, the National Gallery

'has brought together

'three of the most precious masterpieces in Britain -

'Titian's late, great paintings of the goddess Diana.'

'The deity of the moon, worshipped in Roman and Greece

'when the Olympic were first staged,

'is about to get a startling make-over for the 21st century.'

There's another link here, back to the classical past.

Titian took his inspiration from the Roman poet, Ovid,

who, in turn, took his stories from Greek mythology.

'What we're seeing here is the latest stage in a relay,

'that began well over 2,000 years ago.

'The passing of the flame of inspiration between people

'in different places, different eras and different art forms.

'And for the last laps of that marathon,

'we've been filming this creation as it happens.'

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

In March 2012, the National Galleries in London and Edinburgh

revealed they had jointly paid £45 million for a single painting.

Tiziano Vecelli, known simply as "Titian" to us,

painted Diana and Callisto in Venice in the late 1550s.

Amidst a beautiful landscape,

a story of lust and cruelty is unfolding.

The nymph Callisto has been raped by Jupiter,

yet her mistress, the goddess of chastity, is about to banish her.

Titian created a companion piece at the same time,

and always intended the pair to be hung together.

Diana and Actaeon

is another sensual, spellbinding dramatic scene.

It, too, was recently saved for the nation,

after a £50 million fundraising campaign.

They were the greatest paintings in private homes this country.

But these pictures have, perhaps, almost everything in them

that he would really create a painting -

landscape,

female nude, strong expressions, a powerful narrative,

elements of comedy and a lot of tragedy.

Greek tragedy, in fact.

This is a tale that was already centuries old

when Ovid included it in his Metamorphoses in 8 AD.

The huntsman, Actaeon, has outraged Diana by catching sight

of what no mortal should - her nakedness.

Her savage revenge is depicted in the final painting of the series,

The Death of Actaeon.

Now, the hunter is Diana. The spell she's cast on Actaeon

is changing him into a stag.

And he is ripped to pieces by his own hounds.

Nearly 500 years after this image was created,

it's about to be reunited with the other two Diana paintings.

For the first time since the 18th century,

all three will be displayed in the same gallery.

To mark this, 21st century artists, Chris Ofili, Conrad Shawcross

and Mark Wallinger,

have been challenged to fill a room of the National Gallery

with new work inspired by Titian.

The project is the brain child of curator Minna Moore Ede.

The National Gallery is full of paintings and artists

that are themselves looking back to art of the past.

These encounters go on all the time upstairs in the National Gallery,

so Turner is looking back at Claude,

or Velazquez is looking back at Titian.

In some ways, this is a very natural thing to do,

to ask the artists of today to look back at the art of the past.

But, as if taking on Titian wasn't enough of a challenge,

each artist must also design a ballet.

Now, who would dare come up that idea?

It was the Gallery coming and talking about the Titians,

and I thought, "There's something very exciting here".

Three artists having an opportunity to explore

what they would do on this huge stage,

here in the Opera House.

So all that remained for the Royal Ballet to do

was to team the three artists with suitable choreographers.

But when the director came up with her wish list,

she found it hard to choose.

When I wrote their names down and I looked at all of them,

I just thought, "Well, now there are seven people".

It was a kind of instant "ping" moment, and I thought

there was something there that could work together.

Monica decided to hire all seven choreographers,

yoking them together into three teams.

She's clearly hoping two heads, or even three, will be better than one.

But, as one sceptic asked,

"Does one look after the arms, and another the legs?"

And how will they all work with the artists?

There's a huge element of risk involved.

I mean, just for three visual artists,

who normally display in a gallery setting,

to suddenly be asked to make a set for a stage which is 37 metres high

is a huge challenge. They're way out of their comfort zone.

I started with what sounded like the tallest order.

The threesome who are working with Chris Ofili

and composer Jonathan Dove and librettist Alastair Middleton.

I don't know any other project that's done anything like it.

I don't know anything else

where lots of choreographers have all worked together.

-It really isn't normal.

-THEY LAUGH

It isn't a normal way of working, though, is it?

Like for us, I mean, it's not a normal process,

but that's the great challenge of it, and, as artists,

you always look for different ways of working.

So, when you first got together and looked at the painting,

what did you make of it?

Our very first conversation was all of us together.

Most of the meeting was, not really talking about

what we were going to put on stage, but was about the painting.

What the picture was about.

One very striking thing about one of the images is the reveal.

It's a pulling back of a curtain, it's the moment

where Actaeon sees Diana naked,

and his life is destroyed in that moment.

'To try to understand these characters,

'some of the dancers from this team have come to the National Gallery,

'including Federico Bonelli, who'll be playing Actaeon.'

This is the painting that, sadly, we won't have here

till the exhibition opens, but I think you look very like him.

THEY LAUGH

I always thought you would be perfect. He does, doesn't he?

There's this amazing moment, this kind of threshold moment,

where he pulls back this curtain, which is fantastically theatrical.

That's kind of the exact moment that he's showing

that she's twisting and turning, but it's too late, he's seen her.

Isn't that a fantastically balletic pose?

Then, what you see in this last painting in the sequence,

is the moment of transformation.

So Diana, from being the hunted figure in that,

from being vulnerable, is suddenly this fantastic huge, strong...

The shifting dynamic between Diana and Actaeon

is open to multiple interpretations,

which is exactly what the choreographers

are planning for their ballet.

The heart of the piece is kind of like this three retellings,

almost like rewind, and, "This I my perspective of what happened,

"this is Liam's", and it lends itself to the whole project, really.

Yeah, it felt like a very fertile idea to see this same moment

from different angles.

What's going on between these two people

at the moment the curtain goes back?

I suppose the most obvious thing is Diana's rage, her anger.

She's a very powerful woman and her anger has very dramatic consequences.

HE PLAYS PIANO

I do wonder, at some point, why Diana got so angry.

It's like, "Aren't you overdoing it a little bit?"

# It's careless It's careless, it's careless. #

And so on. And we rewind again back to the moment

where Actaeon's curiosity is roused.

This time, something that maybe feels almost more like a love dread,

even though the story's not going to end well.

HE PLAYS PIANO

# Lucena

# She leads into light

It's sensuous, but it has piano wire through the middle of it,

which is sort of how I think that gaze works.

There's the fantastic taught quality

to the way that they look at each other across the space.

I think there must have been a moment where he thought,

"Well, I'm a good-looking guy -

"they're not going to refuse me".

Finally, the last version, Actaeon comes into the foreground.

This time round,

it's more a celebration of his masculinity, perhaps.

HE PLAYS PIANO

He's a young man,

very skilled in the forest, great hunter.

So, I think he pretty much thought

he could get a peep without them seeing him.

But as he got closer, he got a little carried away.

Somebody's always got to get it in the Greek tragedies, you know.

Callisto got it, Actaeon got it.

It's just that thing of, don't mess with me.

She casts a spell and he is transformed.

How that's going to be achieved and who by, I'm not quite sure.

I don't know how that's going to be achieved.

LAUGHTER

As Marianela Nunez works on bringing Diana back to life,

it's already clear this team's approach

is going to be a little different from Titian's.

While the old master set the Olympian world in renaissance landscape,

Chris Offili has transposed the story to Trinidad,

the island he's made his home for the past few years.

So mysterious. Hole in the wall.

This is pretty much the set.

It's so interesting, because I can see the way dancers move and the way

you see pieces of the bodies and the anatomy.

I can see it in these roots of the trees and the plants.

What I was thinking was I would be journeying through the forest

and hearing the sounds of the nymphs bathing,

but then, would start to see female forms in the trees,

so the lust was already starting to play on him

before he even reached the lair.

To transform his model into reality,

Chris has come to the Royal Opera House's scenic workshops

in Essex.

Though he's made large canvasses before,

he's never attempted something on this scale -

an image that's 70 feet wide and 40 feet tall.

I wanted to paint the backdrop.

I want it to look like it was made by hand.

Sometimes, it's nice to do something where you don't have a back-up plan,

you just feel like, OK, if I fail now,

it's true failure, but I truly tried.

Usually, set designers leave the work of scaling up

to specialist scenic painters.

The Opera House staff can't believe

that Chris wants to paint it himself.

When you first put a canvas down, they are quite daunting.

The artwork he's done is one to 50,

it is quite small.

But no, I think he was very excited when he first realised,

wow, you can walk across your painting.

What Chris wanted to bring to it was his quintessential line.

It's interesting watching him work,

because he watches a lot, literally looking at a line, a curve.

Then he goes back down the ladder, he makes an adjustment.

To paint a line for a minute and walk with it

was something I'd never really done before.

During the process, there are moments of elation.

PIANO PLAYS

Meanwhile, all the characters in the painting are coming to life.

The first instant we see the nymphs, we have to establish who they are,

what they are and what they're doing.

It's meant to be this kind of, very private grotto,

so what I thought would be nice, is for them

to have their backs to us, because you get that sense of,

maybe you shouldn't be watching this.

There's a certain unease that comes from watching someone

who doesn't know that you're watching them.

There were certain poses that were actually in the painting,

that we lifted out and then that was a starting point

and this idea of, kind of having this very, kind of,

ethereal, feminine quality. You know,

a lot of the heads are almost turned beyond what you usually do,

so it was just a question of asking the girls to show off a little bit

more of the kind of, more feminine parts of the body

that is in the picture.

They're just these, kind of, starting points

where it's nice to kind of bounce off and you kind of branch out from them.

No arms, Pete.

Titian isn't the only ghostly presence

hovering in the these rehearsals.

So is Ovid. His metamorphosis

have been inspiring artists for over 2,000 years -

not just Titian, but figures from Shakespeare to Bob Dylan.

Now, 14 poets have been commissioned especially for this project,

to write new works inspired by the Diana stories,

among them the great Seamus Heaney.

"He was like a beast on heat.

"As if he'd prowled and stalked,

"until he found the grove, the grotto

"and the bathing place of the goddess and her nymphs.

"As if he'd sought that virgin nook deliberately,

"as if his desires were hounds

"that had quickened pace on Diana's scent,

"before his own pack wrought her vengeance on him.

I saw a word the other day, which I hadn't seen before,

the mythosphere, and...

..I mean, that is where Ovid is operating.

You're at a stage when nobody is believing in the gods,

I don't think, you know. They become stories.

The stories fulfil some lead, some picture transcendence, I suppose.

It's interesting, isn't it, that so many different artists,

over such a long period, can reinterpret the same story?

Is it Ovid's or Titian's or Seamus Heaney's?

Well, it was David Jones, I think,

who said that one of the artist's tasks

was to give form to that by which he or she was formed,

and I think

the possibility of reforming it, as it were,

for a new moment,

is there all the time, yeah.

All three of Titian's Diana paintings,

feature characters who are violently transformed.

Callisto is about to be changed into a bear.

Her ultimate fate is to become a constellation of stars.

Transformation is at the heart of Ovid.

Maybe it is because change is the only certainty,

and of the Ovid myths are heightened change.

We can recognise them and relate to them

in our own lives, like the change from woman to bear,

for our changes of mood

or changes in our bodies.

Titian referred to his paintings of metamorphosis as poesia -

literally, "poems".

He was probably slightly in competition with Ovid.

I think he may well have thought, you know,

this is a great story, but I can tell it better.

Because paint can get at something that words can't.

The idea that he went to Ovid

and metamorphosed what was a story in text,

into a story in painting,

I think opens the door for other artists to say,

OK, I'm going to make another change into my own medium.

"We all had rounded bellies then, but nine months gone,

"so my navel curved like a gash

"and, oh, so noticeable among all the diagonals.

"And everyone looking a different way, looking a lot,

"especially the goddess, her arrow arm pointing,

"bow mouth strung and the artist's finger loaded

"and the paint alive."

Not all the contemporary artists creating new work

for the National Gallery are painters.

Heading up the second creative team

is sculptor, Conrad Shawcross.

His many pilgrimages to see Titian's work

have made him acutely aware of the challenge he faces.

Being in such a, sort of, intimidating environment,

in this incredible lineage of the greatest masters the world has seen,

it's quite difficult to know what to do.

Conrad often works with metal and reclaimed materials,

but what he eventually comes up with for Titian

is quite a surprise.

Amidst the tools in his studio,

are machines that once served in factories, manufacturing cars.

Soon, though, one of these ready-made robots,

will take to the stage of the Royal Opera House

as the centrepiece of Conrad's ballet design.

So, the dancers will be dancing with the robot?

Absolutely, yeah.

These movements are quite fluid, aren't they?

There's something, in the terms of the way it moves, very beguiling.

In a way, even though this is such a brutal piece of industrial machinery,

it is very analogist to the human arm.

I mean essentially, it's trying to create a vocabulary

or a lexicon of emotions, but through movement.

ROBOT WHIRRS

So, there's a certain moment

where the robot will go from a very sensual,

kind of, feminine, seductive motion,

to one where, it's sort of, almost like Brownian motion.

-And he's going to go...

-Scary.

..much more kind of rapid, random motion between points.

How do you get from Titian to this?

Well, it's a good question. I mean, the two paintings,

Diana And Actaeon and The Death Of Actaeon,

they're very similar in their layout.

Actaeon is stage left, sort of, larger than life,

striding in, and Diana is recoiling, kind of, painted quite small.

This is The Death Of Actaeon.

They've almost got the same scale and they're both stage left.

Actaeon, in this one,

is almost identical to Diana in the first painting.

True. Reversed roles, almost.

Completely, and if you lay them over each other, they're, as paintings,

almost identical. So, there's this sort of shift of power and control.

Diana is very feminine, very vulnerable,

to then, very powerful

and very dominant and very destructive.

So, am I looking at Diana?

Yeah. I was interested in casting Diana as technology

and sort of making this thing, that we are seduced by and dependant upon,

but also, we all have that sort of uneasy sort of relationship with it

and that, I think, fear that what the future holds for all of us

in terms of the, sort of, unstoppable march of technology.

WHIRRING

I can't wait to see Carlos Acosta meet his new dance partner.

The Cuban star won't only be working with a robot

and fellow principle dancer, Ed Watson.

He's also, for the first time,

working with the Royal Ballet's resident choreographer

Wayne McGregor.

You're thinking about getting your arms...

At this rehearsal, Wayne is hoping to inspire his dancers,

not with music from the ballet,

but what sounds like an unending fire alarm.

SHRILL TRILL

What I loved about the robot was its own sound, its authentic sound,

and I wanted to get some of that energy

into the studio when I was working.

And Ed and Carlos, how have they responded to the robot?

Well, I proposed it as a kind of a new dancing partner for them.

I think they were quite excited by it. I think what's going

to be interesting is, actually how much power

an industrial robot can emulate in terms of kinetics and force.

But also, how much a small body, a Carlos Acosta,

with all that power and energy, can attract an audience to watch.

Um, bei, ba, um, bei, good.

Ba, da, bei, chasse, chasse, tip,

tip, rotate, one, bei, around, that's it.

Nice, yeah. Neck, back...

'He's got so many languages in his body, you know.

'He's got this kind of very animalistic way of moving.'

He's got a fantastic accuracy, and there's that combination of factors

'that I think contrast very well with Ed, cos he's a very different type of physical behaviour.'

I was interested to see what those two bodies look like together. As aspects, perhaps, of Actaeon.

Carlos Acosta is undergoing a metamorphosis of his own on this project.

Best known for classical and romantic roles,

at the age of 39,

he's having to learn the strikingly contemporary dance style used by Wayne McGregor.

-Here...

-Yeah.

-You do this.

I mean, that was an incredibly demanding rehearsal I saw there.

And even the idea of the memory of having to remember these moves.

It's definitely something to practice, and almost,

'it's that your brain kind of gets rewired to be able to do it.

'And I've noticed that with Carlos, that we started a bit slower,'

and then, absolutely very quickly, the brain organises itself.

'And now he's super-speedy.' And... PIANO PLAYS

To achieve these transformations and the way his dancers move,

Wayne seems to be communicating in a language of his own invention.

HE USES DANCING COMMAND

But then, when you get there, land. Go "Warg-g-gh," like that. "Warg-g-gh!"

There's some information contained within this "Wo-oh-oh-sa,"

that you couldn't do any other way, and the body just understands it.

Bom, wa-a-ay, dom.

Bom-wah. Lovely.

So, it changes behaviour of a body,

but comes from something which isn't verbal.

It's not words.

Wayne has collaborated with many visual artists before,

as well as musicians such as Thom Yorke.

But on this project, like Carlos,

he's taking a creative leap into the dark.

I think what's been unusual for me, I've never collaborated with another choreographer.

That's been quite a challenge.

PIANO PLAYS

Kim Brandstrup has a very different style.

So far, the two men have been rehearsing their scenes separately and different studios.

The aim is that we really try and integrate it

and get it as seamless as possible. Of course we differ.

'Wayne has tremendous attack and physicality in the upper body,

'and...'

It's hard to describe it, but I suppose I'm more lyrical,

maybe more flowy, whatever.

'But that should add to the sense of colour and contrast in the work.'

I don't know, I don't know.

'And we've had kind of a collision of ideas that has made us

'reposition our attitude to certain things.'

And I think it's all those kind of interventions and perturbations and changes of thinking

that create a very dynamic kind of creativity,

so that we solve problems in a different way.

And I think all art-making is about solving problems.

-And all creativity is about metamorphosis, isn't it?

-Yeah.

"I've got this idea, how do I interpret it in this form?"

-Yeah, in my way. Yeah.

-"In my way."

-Yeah, absolutely. With my materials, you know.

Titian's material was paint, but he was using it in a very physical way. You know?

I've got the material of a body in front of me,

in the same way you use a colour or phrase,

or I use the temperature of the body of the elasticity of the body.

Or I pull out the body. I almost blur of the body in the same way.

PIANO PLAYS

MUSIC: "Klavierwerke" by James Blake

Titian is the starting point, not just for the ballets,

but for new work that each artist must come up with

at the National Gallery.

Conrad's companion piece has been inspired by Actaeon's fate.

They're very beautiful, aren't they? Sort of really sculptural things.

They are, yeah, and I think they're like lightning bolts.

We scanned some antlers, and then this machine is slowly carving this antler.

Just as the goddess made Actaeon's head sprout antlers,

Conrad's robot is actually being programmed to create a pair.

Carved from wood, they will be shown at the gallery along with the mechanical maker.

When I first saw one of these machines, I was quite threatened by it as an artist.

And I was sort of thinking,

"God, this is sort of usurping the role of the maker and the artisan."

But actually, it just changes the position of the artist.

It just means we have to have evolve,

just like the invention of adhering paint to a surface.

The great Renaissance artists were also playing with materials

-and discovering new materials the whole time.

-Yeah.

And Titian and Leonardo and those painters had studios in which they tried out new ideas.

All of these people were sort of at the bleeding edge of their technologies at the time,

and it's sort of quite easy to forget that.

Titian was very experimental with his medium.

It's about the way paint is put on canvas,

and it's trying to convey something quite different from the reality of the event.

I mean, he's often called "the father of modern painting,"

and he's been the father of modern painting since the 17th century.

We don't know exactly when he was born,

but he was probably between 86 and 88 when he died.

And he was painting right up until his death.

When Titian painted The Death Of Actaeon,

he would've been at least 80.

He, increasingly, as he got older, was trying to get at the essence,

that truth of whatever that was - a person he painted, a story.

I don't think anybody in their '80s would be at their physical prime.

But he may have been at his imaginative prime.

It's a painting which has inspired artists ever since,

including the third of the contemporary figures taking part in the Titian 2012 project.

The National Gallery's x-ray of The Death Of Actaeon so fascinated Mark Wallinger,

that he once displayed it in an exhibition he was curating.

I like the notion of a forensic eye on paintings,

and I suppose it kind of reduces paintings throughout the year

to just their stuff.

The layers of myth drop away,

but there's still something completely captivating about this image.

-About the image itself.

-Yeah.

-This is a particularly fantastic x-ray,

cos you can see the changes in Diana's position very, very clearly.

-Yeah.

-But I think it's a bit less clear in Actaeon.

-It's a bit furious around Actaeon.

-It's a bit furious around Actaeon.

-You know, one recognises passages that are done with some sense of urgency.

-Mm, mm.

You know, these bits here were put on by his fingers, you know?

I mean, this is all pretty radical stuff.

PIANO PLAYS

Two...

Four, five, six...

Radical is also the word for Mark's reimagining of the Titian paintings for his ballet.

One, two, three, four, five...

Go, yeah. ..six, seven, eight...

I began to think about Diana as the Moon Goddess.

She's wearing the crescent moon in the Titian paintings.

And once I started thinking about that,

I thought it would be quite interesting to stage the thing on a kind of lunar landscape.

Actaeon and the hunters become, if you like, Apollo astronauts.

PIANO PLAYS 'They've trespassed upon the symbol of poetry and mystery,

'and they will be punished for their hubris, I suppose.'

PIANO PLAYS

Amidst the ballet's lunar imagery, however,

there are still some distant echoes of the Actaeon myth.

'This image of the men being turned into stags -

'obviously, we're not try to tell the story of the Titian painting.

'But, we do want people to understand that this is where'

you know, we've drawn our inspiration and ideas from.

Do you know what...

Again, there are two choreographers - Christopher Wheeldon and Alastair Marriott.

On this team, they're working happily side-by-side.

And then on the very last beat of the music, you're going to flex your feet, and that's when you do...

-Need to be really brave.

-You've got dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun.

There. That's good.

'What Mark has done is really made the painting a departure point'

for a very contemporary, abstract idea.

But, you know, when you're dealing with people, it's like...

Balanchine famously said that you put a man and a woman together

'and instantly there's a story. They don't know what the story is,

'but as long as you're creating atmosphere and a sense of place,

'and some sort of sense of time,'

then that's really all an audience needs.

Then they can kind of go off and imagine for themselves what it is that they're seeing.

PIANO PLAYS

Wallinger's concept for his ballet is intriguing,

but his plans for the National Gallery are even more so.

I've just seen a tweet from Mark that says,

"Mark Wallinger needs women named Diana

"to participate in a new work as part of Titian 2012."

-Hi!

-Hello.

-Diana.

-You must be a Mark.

-Yes, nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you. Thank you.

'It started with my daughter seeing an advert.'

And because I'm quite proud of being a Diana

and because I've always been quite interested in the myth of Diana

and the fact that she was goddess of the moon and goddess of the hunt,

'her story has always appealed to me.'

And somehow, the fact that I would have to appear naked was really the least of it for me.

Yes, you did here that right - naked.

Mark is planning to reinterpret Titian's scene

with a live nude model in the middle of the National Gallery.

-You're not choosing people because of how they look, or...?

-No, no.

No, no, it's quite nice because it...

Yeah. Things to do with age or race are kind of by-the-by as well. Yeah.

-It's so random.

-Yes.

-You know, choosing people because they're called Diana.

-Yes.

-And I'm proposing building a bathroom.

-Right.

-And...

you, Diana, will be in this bathroom.

-It's completely right. That's exactly how it was.

-Yes.

-Actaeon saw her when she was bathing, so...

-Indeed, indeed.

And I mean... No, I think it's going to be quite something,

-a plumbed in bathroom in the room next to these three Titians.

-Yes.

Well, it just seems to be one of those 100 things to do before you die, doesn't it?

-Right, yes, yes, yes.

-To be in an art installation.

-Yes, yes.

-Yes, it'll be... Yes, yes.

The bathroom begins to be plumbed in to the National Gallery.

Now, some people might be scandalised

at what Mark Wallinger's doing,

but then some people were once scandalised by Titian.

One of the things that I think we all forget

is that all of these artists were contemporary once

and all of the great artists were probably shocking as well.

And we know that these particular paintings certainly caused

consternation at the Spanish court,

because according to contemporary account,

whenever ladies were likely to enter the room

in which those paintings were displayed,

they would be covered by curtains.

Titian created all his metamorphoses paintings

for the young man he depicted in this portrait -

Philip II, the new king of Spain.

You have to remember that these paintings weren't for everybody -

I mean, they were for Philip's Private delectation.

He was famous at the time for his flesh painting.

Titian knew that Philip was highly sexed

and he made a point of painting naked women for him

from different perspectives and different angles.

But although these women were painted for a man, by a man,

Titian's sympathies seemed to lie

not with his patron but his subjects.

He was extremely fond of women.

His women, even when they're naked, are real women.

I'm sure in their context they were titillating -

they must have been - but I think Titian is such a master

that he understands that and produces that feeling

in the looker of the painting of the voyeur,

just as Actaeon in that painting is a voyeur.

Titian wouldn't allow, you know, any would-be voyeur any comfort.

I think there would be a metamorphosis within the watcher,

a kind of change as well.

'And you, sir. Yes, sir, you, who just began to hear these lines -

'you may be a marked man.

'Haven't you half thought that while you view Actaeon's intrusion,

'you're intruding, too?

'Actaeon stares at the stag's skull,

'the flayed skin above the nymph who dries Diana's shin.

'The stag's skull in its dominant position over mortal flesh,

'immortalised by Titian, maybe marks you out to share Actaeon's doom

'after you've left the safety of this room.'

Chris Ofili's design picks up on the adult themes

and content of the Diana myth.

He spent twice as long as he'd first planned on this backdrop -

four weeks in all.

Meanwhile, the Opera House crafts-people

have started work on his designs.

You have to get into the mindset of Chris Ofili, really. Which is this.

And they are all a bit of a weird mix of creatures,

sort of nightmarish creatures.

In Ovid's poem, Actaeon's dogs are partly a metaphor

for how our desires can hound and ultimately destroy us,

but when telling the story on stage

the dogs also need to be a visible working reality.

This is one that is, sort of, almost finished

and they're going to have very red mouths inside

and they'll attack Actaeon.

Ofili drawings, which could fetch a fortune if sold by a gallery,

are here simply blueprints for his prop designs.

They're going to have leads that go to the actual dancer.

They look quite benign, and then when they attack

they'll look quite scary, hopefully.

While Jane finishes her hounds' heads,

the rehearsal room makes do with understudies.

Will Tuckett is the choreographer

whose task is to train the dogs.

So, one, two, three, four.

HE HUMS THE RHYTHM

You look gorgeous. Yeah, your dog looks better.

HE HUMS THE RHYTHM

Yeah, it's just like ball, chain, step, jete, step.

Thanks. And, one...

PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

Ovid would surely approve, the most graceful of human beings,

ballet dancers, are transforming themselves into beasts.

Could you sniff out front?

Yeah, like... HI SNIFFS

Yeah. One, two, three.

Yeah, then down.

Pop it.

That's great, guys. Federico, that's perfect,

that little pull back there was lovely. Very nice, very nice.

Meanwhile, Chris Ofili has had to learn yet another new skill -

costume design.

The nymphs wear these all-in-one figure-hugging Lycra suits.

There was a period when I was trying to think,

"Oh, what's the Olympian world like?

"What did these people actually look like?"

And then it was like, "Wait a minute - this is not a real.

"This is all made up." What do nymphs look like? I don't know.

They maybe have turquoise, yellow and green, so that's what they have.

Titian made it up, too.

'I drew on the suits while they were wearing them'

and those areas were cut out to reveal parts of their flesh.

Just do a bit of that stuff you do...

All that kind of stuff.

That really works with the arms.

I think to try and do it in the drawing

would not have located the cuts precisely

and also I wouldn't have had the experience of talking to the dancer

and some would say, "I think this is the most beautiful part of my body,

"could you draw attention to it?"

And others would say quite the opposite.

So...I felt like some kind of cosmetic surgeon.

-It's got nice movement though.

-Lovely movement.

MUSIC: "The Robots" by Kraftwerk

Barely three weeks before the ballet's open,

the Opera House technicians now realise just what

they've got on their hands with Conrad's robot.

They've never seen anything like this before.

It is a bit terrifying when you consider how heavy it is

and what it's going to be doing.

It's, kind of, the opposite of the set.

When you walk round the back, it isn't made of cardboard and balsawood and painted.

This is the most massive, heavy, industrial machine.

We're still on a vertical learning curve.

It's been like climbing the face of the Eiger.

There's definitely a lot of paranoid dreams about robots

because there were a lot of unknowns and uncertainties

about different elements, but if we pull it off, it's going to be amazing.

The Promethean spark of life the robot requires, however,

will come from one of the dancers working in a motion capture studio.

Eddie, you have to get those little things on, those little baubles.

Everybody has a physical signature and that signature very literal,

you can recognise someone absolutely by the way in which they move

and this process is capturing some of that information and then

translating it into maths and giving that maths then to the robot

to be able to move in that way, so it's almost like a mapping exercise.

It's a transformation from one physical signature, through maths,

to another, so all of a sudden this robot has the physical dimension,

the choreographic dimension of a body and their physicality.

I think that's where there is a very interesting dialogue, then, between

what the robot's doing and what the live physicality is on stage.

And... Go.

There's this very particular part of the choreography,

which is a duet between Ed and Carl Acosta where we've got to remove

one of the bodies and give that information to the robot,

so that the other body can dance with the robot rather than this other live body.

Just watch yourself. You'll recognise that it's you.

What the dancers can provide by the motion capture,

it's got all the humanity, all the gait of the person's walk

or it'll just, I think, enhance the believability of this thing as something sentient.

So if you imagine the surface of his feet are there

and another surface is further out

and you're, kind of, moving inside that space.

This, sort of, figure of eight.

But I'm very much still using the plan, so you're going across.

You're Harry Potter now. THEY LAUGH

It would be a good idea to motion capture a bow

-and get the robot to bow at the end.

-Exactly, yeah, exactly!

Early July and less than a fortnight until opening night.

The image Chris painted on the floor

is now hanging on the back wall of the stage.

Much of the time, he's at the opera house with his choreographers.

But I've come to meet him at the National Gallery

where, at the same time, he's installing his new artworks.

Ten paintings, all based on Ovid's tales of Diana

have just been delivered from his home in Trinidad.

None of these paintings have been shown before

and only some of them can be now.

The problem is there's only space for six

so tough decisions have to be made.

There'll be some that I'm not super keen on

and some that I'm really keen on.

One of the things I think is so appropriate

about your involvement in this project

is that I've always thought with your pictures,

particularly the pictures of scale,

it's like you enter this world and you think...

And you...

You go somewhere surprising and strange and foreign,

but also very absorbing and different.

This project started two years ago,

so what was your first response when you heard about it?

It wasn't easy. This whole process wasn't easy.

It was two years, but the first year was just... Not sleepless nights,

but just thinking, "What am I doing here?

"How did I end up... How did I end up saying yes to this one?"

-Where did you start with Titian?

-I mean, to compare myself...

Even to be in the room next to three masterpieces is...

It's like asking for it.

So I took inspiration from the sense of liberation that you get

in particularly the last of the three,

which is The Death Of Actaeon,

which is considered to be unfinished by some,

but the freedom in the brushstrokes

and just the feeling that the work is still being created 500 years later was an inspiration.

Once I relaxed with that and let go

then I was able in the tenth painting to get to this state of...

..kind of more loose and relaxed.

This is so spontaneous and there is so much energy.

You know, that's the look. What you see is pretty much painted

in a really short period - an embarrassingly short period of time

to be in a national gallery, right?

Shall we go back to Diana, yeah?

A lot of these pictures were made in Trinidad and obviously you're...

There's a whole landscape there and mythology there,

a palette there to be discovered.

How much is this work imbued with that, with the Caribbean?

I think it's there.

There are times when you go walking in the forest in Trinidad.

There's one waterfall I'm thinking of in particular

where it just opens out, and the waterfall feels like it's in a hole

and around 12 o'clock the sun comes directly into that hole

as well as the waterfall into that hole, and you're bathing in the bottom of the pool

and you do feel like the whole thing

is just infected with this particular smell, scent,

taste or feeling that is very unique and very private.

And I think, when I started reading about Ovid,

I could immediately identify, not necessarily with Actaeon

but with that feeling of that sacred space, the private space,

-where you are on your own...

-So true.

..and you can be naked or you can be without fear.

Diana and Actaeon has just come back from a tour of other art galleries

and is beginning a dialogue with its new neighbours.

Within a couple of days, Ofili's paintings have been hung and lit.

And among his final selection is one

that hadn't been there on my previous visit.

I see these paintings here as entwining mythologies

and landscapes, some which are real, some which are invented

and some which he comes from.

Exactly what Titian was doing himself.

That is what I find amazing, that in the back of Diana and Actaeon,

you have got a sort of mountainous landscape,

which is the Dolomites, where Titian was from.

So Titian has placed the Olympian world in a landscape he knew,

and Chris has placed the landscape of the gods

in a world that he knows. They have done the same thing.

There is now under a week until the ballets are premiered,

and Conrad's team have moved onto the stage.

This is the first dress rehearsal,

the first time the dancers have really seen the big machine.

We have very little time to get all the stuff right.

We're pretty behind in terms of all the sequencing we have to do.

Because this is such a unique thing for us to have so many new ballets

in one evening, all these amazing artists working together, all of this has put

a lot of pressure in terms of how much technical time you've got.

But there's a lot more to do, we've got five days to get that done,

so it's a bit of a kind of race against the clock.

The robot is actually quite dangerous, so we can't have

anybody go anywhere near where that wand on the robot can move.

The power to the wand is the light at the end, it is one of the issues,

with that big cable hanging down, because there is 3000 watts

of power going through that, so it gets incredibly hot

and it twists and ravels,

so there is a lot of weight that it's throwing around.

There are, of course, potential problems with the robot not working,

but if that happens, we are really up the creek.

People tell me that all theatre is a crisis until the curtain comes up.

But I don't think that is quite the same with sculpture.

After years of planning and months of rehearsal,

this is the first time anyone has had proof

of how well - or not - dancers and robot will actually get on.

But just as the mechanical Diana is hitting her stride,

all 30 foot of her with arm on extended,

something happens which no-one has rehearsed.

RADIO: 'We have a problem.'

'We have a problem.'

Oh, we've just broken the cable. Oh, fuck.

Do you think we could have some lights on stage?

ANNOUNCEMENT: 'We'd like to take our break now and come back in a second.'

There's this system that winds up a bit like spaghetti on a fork

and we have a way of running the different sequences clockwise

and anticlockwise to unravel them.

-Is it all off, the power to it?

-Yeah, the power's off.

I'll just confirm it. Don't touch anything, yeah?

We didn't have time to test it beforehand because time is so short

and we'd snapped this very, very high voltage cable.

It's a fucking train smash. Shit!

It's... We're fucked.

By contrast, the National Gallery is now a picture of calm.

It's part of the project is now fully installed

and about open to the public.

In pride of place,

the three paintings which have inspired everything else here -

finally reunited after hundreds of years apart.

Now, however, Titian's Diana

is sharing the limelight with new incarnations.

The smaller of Conrad's robots is still functioning.

After last night's trauma, he's lovingly tending his creation.

It's extraordinary to think an industrial machine

actually carved these delicate wooden antlers

and both are now works of art.

This is almost like the epilogue of the story.

It's when Diana has finally killed Actaeon, only then is she sated,

and here she's grooming herself and she is basically back in her glade,

in her pool but she's got her prize. This is a trophy.

She's transformed him

through this sort of magic wand that she has here, whatever it is,

this magic light and now she's just preoccupied and satisfied.

Yeah. Someone, a few days ago, described it.

He said, "So sensual and yet so cold." That was so perfect for me

because I think that's the thing about Diana,

she's a symbol of desire yet the way she behaves

to both Actaeon, and particularly Callisto, is very, very brutal

and very lacking in humanity or any kind of empathy really.

I think that's what I wanted to try and get across, this powerful,

awesome but sensual sort of sexual presence.

Two days later and back at the Opera House,

Conrad's looking more cheerful.

The dancing robot is functioning once more, but today sees

a new element added to this already fiendishly complex production -

a full-scale orchestra.

The dress rehearsal begins as Nico Muhly's score strikes up.

Nico's worked with everyone from Bjork to Philip Glass in recent years,

but this time he sought inspiration

from a piece of English church music, written in the same century

as Titian was painting.

The beginning and the end are a William Byrd motet, the Miserere Mei,

which is an example of something that's starting to exist

as choral music and then being translated into the orchestra.

There's that sort of metamorphosis that happens

when something that used to be a voice has become a string,

or something that used to be an arm has become a robotic arm.

Where's Titian in the final piece?

Well, I think, there's...

For me it's very obvious in the landscape that there is

a sequence of drones that opens the second section.

It looks pastoral and then all of a sudden, upon further investigation,

you realise that there's something sinister.

There's a kind of violent energy and that was something that

I reacted to, directly from the paintings

in these extreme gestures, which is made physically

obvious by the choreography,

but also musically there's a real tension that almost never releases.

It's a sort of terraced thing with all these big diagonal lines,

which is how I hear it.

I don't know, I think it's not meant to be like a literal translation

of the painting into music and dance.

I don't think that's what anyone was going for, because then you could

just walk down the street and see the painting and you'd be fine.

It's a reaction.

It's sort of the resonance of the thing, rather than the thing itself.

The Opera House team

have to switch rapidly between the three different ballets.

This is Mark Wallinger's set.

The giant mirror will reflect the audience back to itself.

Sometimes what they will see is more of a surprise,

because this is a two-way mirror.

That's good, yeah. The mirror actually behaves

slightly differently than we anticipated.

Split it a bit more. No, split it more.

Can you not hear me through this? Bloody hell!

LAUGHTER

Needs a bit of time to think, sits back from it,

takes in the big picture.

Whereas I can get down there and in a very short amount of time

boss everyone around and get them into the right places on stage.

I would rather let someone else worry about

if someone is out of line and things.

Beatrice, try to get into line with the girls here.

7, 1, 2, 3.

Better.

Sorry, guys. We're just trying to figure it out, Steve.

Sometimes the time pressure can actually be quite useful.

OK, right on the fugue, please, Barry.

There are no two ways about it. You either get it done or you don't.

You have to allow yourself time to cut things,

even if it is the 11th hour.

They are just not on it.

Could you guys stop? Sorry, Barry. Sorry to stop you.

It is the dancers that find it really stressful

because we spend a lot of the time putting them in positions

but they just want to run it.

I am sure there probably really fed up with us.

-If only he could make more of the splits upside down.

-Yes.

What is she doing?

-She had a straight leg at the front.

-Maybe her leg doesn't bend.

I can't watch, because it is on on Saturday,

and I'm having a nervous breakdown.

The ballet might not be ready yet

but at the National Gallery

Mark Wallinger's artwork is installed

and getting a lot of attention.

He took me to see what some of the tabloids

have been making a fuss about.

I hear the sound of running water. I see a sponge.

Someone is bathing in here, I suspect.

I can report that this Diana was indeed as naked as the goddess.

I really do feel, I mean,

that this is sort of forbidden, really, isn't it?

-Indeed, yes.

-I know what Actaeon felt like.

-Yes.

-The sense of trespass is there. The sense of something forbidden.

-Yes.

Of voyeurism.

It is trying to stage an encounter, or an instinct, or a curiosity,

that we all have.

And of course, cinematically, Hitchcock, Powell,

there are classic films about the perils,

the same peril that Actaeon found himself in,

and how to looking sometimes has more intent or consequences than...

We kind of understand that.

But this is a work of art. So was Titian's.

So you have permission.

In a way you get bound up with the very nature of this place.

If you said, "This show contains nudity",

that is kind of like, big deal, the entire building's full of it!

The nudey bits always seem to be the most popular.

So yeah, things don't change.

The News of the World didn't exactly die of shame.

People carried on buying the thing until Murdoch shut it down.

-Can I have another look?

-Yes, absolutely, yes.

Saturday July 14th.

Ready or not it is opening night at the Royal Opera House.

APPLAUSE

Seeing Mark Wallinger's ballet so soon after his installation,

certain shared themes emerge.

This too is a work about looking,

about narcissism as well as voyeurism.

It went really well.

I think being thrown together

and having to create really sort of in the moment and spontaneously

creates an energy.

That is undeniable.

One new ballet of that quality would be impressive

but this of course is a premiere times three.

Conrad Shawcross has more reason than most for opening night nerves.

Will his robot make it through the performance?

APPLAUSE

I feel a tremendous sense of relief that it all went to plan.

We were working until 45 minutes before the opening,

so we were very much... very last minute.

It felt like there was another cast member on stage, you know?

It didn't feel like this big looming thing behind us,

it really felt part of everything we were doing as well, so...

I think it worked.

I think both Wayne and I are very happy. It was a challenge, you know, working together.

But I think something very interesting

comes out of the meeting with somebody who's that different.

And it enriches you.

The finale of the evening

is the telling of the story of Diana and Actaeon,

as it inspired Chris Ofili and his collaborators.

The last carriers of the flame, passed on to them

across the centuries by both Titian and Ovid.

You sign up to believe that what happens within this box

is real, for 35 minutes, before ice-cream time.

You know, it's that wonderful feeling that we as human beings still like to

play make-believe and have a little doll's house and move things around.

Of course, it's far more sophisticated than that, but...

it's still that wonderful thing that, um, we like to make things ourselves.

# Actaeon!

# Actaeon ego sum. #

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