music theatre

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The Counting Sisters

for voice, live-electronics, video and performance

„The Counting Sisters“ contains a further development of the main musical material I composed for the the 60-minutes piece „C:\dialogue\towards_between.mxo“, commissioned by the NTU Centre for Contemporary Arts Singapore, on the occasion of the exhibition „The Sovereign Forest“ by Amar Kanwar.
The performance on stage is on the one hand an allegory for a ritual of „counting the dead“ as explained in the story of The Counting Sisters written by Amar Kanwar, where six women (in an act of political resistance) collect information around people who recently died due to political „issues“. On the other hand it is the translation of a general phenomenon of digital interconnection: The more information we receive,
the less we notice. Or to express it differently: The more we see, the less we see. Every day our online newspapers and social media timelines are covered with a vast amount of latest news, videos, pictures,
blog posts and comments about 100.000 dead of yesterday, 235.000 of today and a forecast for tomorrow. The dead disappear behind mere numbers. An incident becomes more grave as more dead are counted.
The individual becomes insignificant.
The voice and the resonating body form the nucleus of all sound and stand in interactive correspondence with a real time sound modulating Max patch. Furthermore the performer’s body functions as a projection surface for the visual translation of text immanent processes. Movements extend from raw performative expressions to a tool of interaction between the performer and the computer.

2017, premiered at Sound and Music Computing Conference SMC in Helsinki