MEDIATHEK

“I’m Building” is a theater piece for two actors and a djembe, floor tom, soprano recorder, alto recorder, slide whistle, Irish whistle, and piano. The instruments are placed around the stage, creating a ritual environment that the performers treat with deference. Choreography highlights their ceremonial properties, as if their sounds are to be used and meditated on. With procedural gestures, the actors play and manipulate the instruments.

The work begins with a pageantry that proceeds irrationally, leading to self-flagellation and other effacing demonstrations. Between these movements are silences, adding tension, always to be broken by the urgency in sound and movement. A confrontation develops, opaquely sexual, and leads to the last section of the piece. The performers complete their ritual and they part, unsure of the meaning they constructed.

“I’m Building” comes from a tradition of concert theater, that is to say a genre in which sound and visuals are conceived simultaneously. It follows along the practice of Heiner Goebbels and Jani Christou, two composers who implemented acting as musical gesture. In the case of this work, each bodily maneuver follows another with formulaic intent, physical pauses separating them as to paint a moment. These “freezes” lead to a relaxation of character; the performers interrupt their personas and are directed to listen. Music is thus highlighted.

The audio for the work isn’t to be perceived in chunks like the theater. Although intense moments of sound are created via physical exertion, these sounds are meant to participate with the environment. They blend and linger as the audience is asked to contemplate their morphing. The work acts as a single piece of music comprised of several theatrical events.

Similar to the abstracted dream-like world that Jani Christou often created, “I’m Building” shows how rituals may be perceived by an outsider: bizarre and selfconsuming. ¬ There is a possession that holds the performers while they fulfill their motions. However, through self-aware questioning, the illusion of their actions dissipates and the work is left unstable. Both sound and image become disingenuous.