Output details

HYGIENE

Concert work for 10 performers and DVD

‘HYGIENE’ is a work for 10 performers and DVD, commissioned by the Ultraschall Festival (Berlin). It proposes an expansion of the musician’s roles: an individual with highly specialised training on one musical instrument becomes a performer who can execute multiple roles, moving from action to inaction, sound to silence, text and noise.

As well as making sounds with instruments, voice or objects, the performers carry out movements and actions. Although some of these are sounded, many are silent, but the rhythmic, textural and dynamic profiles of the silent actions trigger audience members' mirror neurons so that they too can be ‘heard’. Different movement vocabularies are integrated, both aesthetically and technically: performers spell out semaphore, enact intense arguments, mouth texts, or engage in callisthenics originally designed by Moritz Schreber, creator of many physical training systems for children, most of which would today be considered useless or cruel.

The text for ‘HYGIENE’ is from August Strindberg’s ‘Inferno/An Occult Diary’ but the work is rooted in the music-theatre tradition of composers such as Mauricio Kagel, Vinko Globokar and Gerhard Stäbler, in theatre works such as Beckett’s ‘Quad’ and in choreographic works such as Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion’s ‘Both Sitting Duet’. Despite these theatrical influences, however, the piece positions itself specifically as "music" through the stage set-up and furniture and the performers positioned at stations in the traditional manner, most of them with music stands.

The score consists of a table giving a vertical rather than horizontal schedule of events, precise instructions for the performers, including musical notations, textual instructions and pictures. The DVD was shot and edited by the composer and functions as an integral part of the work; like the performers the video edits explore the same shift between the polarities of image and absence of image, stasis and movement.