Concept
Several fields of activity, independent and freely interpenetrating, elements seen and heard simultaneously, are at work in the consciousness of the listener-spectator.
Without trying to be at the absolute centre, phenomena come together, are superimposed, and each forms the centre of its own experience – Letting time just be, free from the constraints of any linear relation.
Suspended, the elements of the mobile sculpture turn silently throughout the whole space.
The spectators are placed around or even under the sculpture,
An enigmatic being, “the manipulator” (the dancer) deploys her slow movements in the centre, interspersed with abrupt gestures and expressions, switching from extreme subtlety to savage violence.
Four musicians, a singer, a cellist, a flautist, a percussionist and an electronic control switchboard are placed around the public.
A man (the actor), among the public, moves, slowly or agitatedly, following his own “long way” to the centre, where he dies.
The music and dance continue imperturbably, together with the movements of the sculpture.
The light coming from all sides, follows an abstract concept, moving from moments of twilight to blinding luminosity.
For the first time in the Treibgut cycle, the presence of an actor is brought into play.
The public, which itself forms an integral part of the spectacle, sees the actor as one of its number, “the man next to you”, your neighbor.
This presence, at first discreet and, seemingly, secondary, becomes the medium for the central theme, “dying”. For this man, time tilts suddenly into another dimension. Within his consciousness, fragments of memory well up outside their context in time, projecting him towards the new.
He dreams he’s going home after a long absence, but can neither walk nor speak and must struggle to move forward, as though he were traversing a dense invisible mass of traces, messages, words, forms, signs, floating like Treibgut – flotsam and jetsam – above the ground of his imagination.
Ardently, he desires to recover his speech.
“Who is it who can tell me who I am?” (Shakespeare King Lear)
Coming to the border between what has been and becoming, he perceives the One, and dies.
Death as initiation, in which one finds one’s true voice, one’s true tongue.
He dies in movements, almost like those of the dance, almost like the dancer’s,.
Thus in “Shô” the spectator is detached from his perception of time. Inner space is not subject to time, and the immensity that opens up is vertiginous.