This musical performance was commissioned by Schallfeld Ensemble as a part of impuls composition commissions and premiered in a project Text im Klang#3 in Graz.
It’s a musical play for three characters: Her, Time and Presence. Her is carefully wrapped in craft paper together with a contrabass, so in the beginning all we see is a white motionless object-cocoon. Time - a percussion player - is playing a mask as if a woodblock. Time appears from the darkness and approaches Her from behind; and Presence is a person revealing themselves by taking care of amplification and light (the indications for both are written down in the score). The whole piece is performed by heart.
The text in the beginning of the piece I collected myself, piece by piece, over time by writing down words and expressions, which resonated with me, from various books I was reading. Eventually those pieces formed a poem; a prerecorded female voice opens the piece reciting them in a total darkness:
“a message from the world in which we are absent
things transpire with a beautiful sheen of natural necessity
suck the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship
we are walking talking minerals
no fixed abode
dangerously vibrant matter
too beautiful to deny”
This performance is an exploration of multiple identities within oneself, an effort to find the true one. The image unfolding in front of us is a mirror of interactions with other people and their identities - the world of masks, where Time could be also an artfully built illusion. A constant longing for one’s presence is hidden behind the layers of one’s absence. Only through the rupture one can penetrate the substance but no one knows how deep the absence is. It might be as deep as an infinite mirror.
