WHY DOES NIGHT COME MOTHER
Perspective and Gravity
1989
A scenic composition to be seen from a bird’ s eye view. The performance is created for a narrow and high-ceilinged room framed by balconies at several floors. The audience is watching from the balconies, looking towards the floor – the stage where Here a singer is lying and a narrator is sitting while four other performers are standing, walking or lying down. The performers are seen as reliefs, as moving signs and patterns on a white flat surface. A black man is sitting on a black chair projecting rays of light. The performance is composed as a sequence of poems set to music and visual images kept in black/grey/white tones.
The performance makes use of various kinds of perspective and spatial reproduction. Through the vertical field of vision, perspective and gravitation coincide. The performance explores the primary processes of vision – the sense impression that occurs before an objective description of the seen world takes place. The eye composes a two-dimensional image (R2), but the brain corrects it and we sense three-dimensional (R3). In between, there is a stage in which forms exist in R2.5 – half way between flat and spacious, a relief stage that appears to be more open and scanning more widely. This is the realm of meaning that corresponds with an incomplete, less stable, a more undetermined and more reflective phase in the processes of the senses.
The floor turns into a ceiling upon which the figures performing have been hung. The flat white surface becomes a laboratory for expressions where life’s yearning for the distant and death’s yearning for the abyss coincide.
Duration 70 min. no intermission