Wednesday, December 31, 2008

WAITING WINDED (Astronome)




Rehearsals have started for ASTRONOME: A NIGHT AT THE OPERA, which is a music/theater collaboration between John Zorn and Richard Foreman. Fulya Peker, a returning performer in the show, gives us her thoughts on the piece:

WAITING WINDED
Silence is indeed a golden pendulum, swinging between past and future, evoking a present decision for our lost in time minds… What causes the momentum of this magical object? Is it the subtle twitch of the hand that holds it? Is it the air that comes out with each exhale? Entangled, loosened strings of stillness? The fortuitous oracle speaks thus:

The subject of the decision is never really the ostensible subject matter but an object, which liberated itself from the reality of verbs that dominate each sentence. Each object is the most important object but yet all of them moving together long enough at a certain pace establish a still image, a whole… Stillness born out of movement… Use your senses to the full! One may capture stillness by rotating the mind relentlessly towards the direction of the axle of this unstable reality… But still, the thief who steals the pleasure of punctuated stillness from a period is called “reason.”

Here and there, the expectation creates the expected and the expected creates the one who expects, i.e. “subject.” The struggle to affirm our conditional existence inflames the airways and causes shortness of breath… To access the universe of proliferating realities one sacrifices the nose first… To be able to articulate what the once not known could have been, one has to learn to look deep inside the nostrils… As a nasal reaction we have an aim to deny some substances that are breathed in… Thus, we have to be careful not to sneeze out the secret every time we inhale this dusty, salty reality… Winded… “My genius is in my nostrils…”

Were you here watching me doing this? Goodness… Do not smell my navel… Indigested possibilities of uncontrolled desires are still banging themselves to the walls of my intestines… Cover it with black fabric… Do not tell what is behind… Wait a minute! There is indeed a man who still has a nose in here, smelling me on behalf of the audience, provoking the clause “I am I am not…” Close your eyes, close your ears. Write it down:
This is a world in which one is about to experience something that is about to be experienced until the next peripeteia that takes place over and over again and each time, another switched universe is about to be revealed and all affirmations are about to break up. What would happen if I do this? Shall I do it? Maybe… Yet, it is still me… Neurosis… Tip-toe… “Tell me, have I been a bad person…” Scream in the woods.

Well, remember there is always an audience. Here chaos is about to be framed—be quiet and respect the initiations of vocalized time… Too many details all at once… Do not come forth! Do not comfort! Do not be too curious… No reason whatsoever! There is nothing important!

This unauthorized volume requires alchemy… Take a fistful of salt, circle it around your head, and throw it into the fire… The harmony of spirits will burn with the salt… Do it all over again… Do it just to try it… Just for the pleasure of decision making… Just to feel like an authority in this universal momentum… Divagating divine trials and failures… There is only one inspiration in this room. The false messiah, named not! Three more days and everything will be all right unless the resurrection of “reason” is delayed due to some respiratory problems.

The music is now solidified in the throat of a man, prophesying the rhythm of each blink… Listen! But be aware that you listen! Do not forget to exhale! I do not know how to exhale! Just hold your breath, then… Art begins with a hold! He says “Art begins with a mark…” Hold the mark!

How much does the equipment cost if one would like to switch the universes?