amatter at Gesundbrunnen Mall former Rossmann, Berlin
20 minutes
2023
See excerpt from script here.
Three voiced performance. They wear nametags with their roles of character name, stage direction, and line. They are vocally coached to match one another’s pitch, mimicking the tonality of a sentence or phrase in order to give the impression of one voice coming from multiple bodies. Actors share in the consciousness of a text by completing each other’s line, thus de-individualizing the labor of producing performative text. For example,
I AM a finite being
The character names and stage directions are explicitly part of the performed speech. The audience or reader imagines I AM as a character name, a finite as stage directions, and “being” as a spoken line; I intend these three embodied theatrical conventions to be imagined both literally and impossibly, consistently subverted by the language itself. The excerpted phrase “I am a finite being” is separated into multiple performers and thus emphasizes the tension throughout between the production of distinct roles or bodies and the simultaneous impossibility of that distinction.
Voice plays three includes sparse props and musical elements, because I am interested in the collapsing of poetic symbol with the “real” or material and vice versa, and I use the mixing of genre or performative contexts to emphasize these shifts in register. For instance, the stage directions say chimes and an actor really plays them, even after no other stage direction has been enacted or literalized for more than half the performance. What was assumed as poetic symbol (the hairbrush) is suddenly manifested as a prop to pass through the audience. The stage directions exit right are recycled into the language until they feel like unactionable poetics.
Performed by Adrienne Herr, Olga Hohmann, Anna Lublina.
Video by Mathilde Heuliez.