Death by Landscape, a concert

a text by Anne Faucheret

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see or the child’s older self, a poet, a woman dreaming when she should be typing the last report of the day. If this were a map, she thinks, a map laid down to memorize because she might be walking it, it shows ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert here and there a sign of aquifers and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map it would be the map of the last age of her life, not a map of choices but a map of variations on the one great choice. It would be the map by which she could see the end of touristic choices, of distances blued and purpled by romance, by which she would recognize that poetry isn’t revolution but a way of knowing why it must come. If this cheap, mass produced wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.. mass-produced yet durable, being here now, is what it is yet a dream-map so obdurate, so plain, she thinks, the material and the dream can join and that is the poem and that is the late report.
– Adrienne Rich, Dreamwood, 1987

Happy are the solitary ones
Those who sow the sky in avid sand
Those who seek the living under the skirts of the wind Those who run panting after an evaporated dream For they are the salt of the earth
Happy are the lookouts over the ocean of the desert Those who pursue the fennec beyond the mirage
The winged sun loses its feathers on the horizon
The eternal summer laughs at the wet grave
– Joyce Mansour, Blue Like a Desert, around 1960

She looks at the paintings, she looks into them. Every one of them is a picture of Lucy. You can’t see her exactly, but she’s there, in behind the pink stone island or the one behind that. In the picture of the cliff, she is hidden by the clutch of fallen rocks toward the bottom; in the one of the river shore she is crouching beneath the overturned canoe. In the yellow autumn woods, she’s behind the tree that cannot be seen because of the other trees, over beside the blue sliver of pond; but if you walked into the picture and found the tree, it would be the wrong one, because the right one would be farther on. Everyone has to be somewhere, and this is where Lucy is. She is in Lois’s apartment, in the holes that open inward on the wall, not like windows but like doors. She is here.

– Margaret Atwood, Death by Landscape, 1990

Death by Landscape, a concert, is a concert, is a film, is a drawing, is a light, is a dance, is a scenery, is a landscape, is a composition, is a celebration, is an invocation.

Death by Landscape, a concert invokes the magic of geology, a kaleidoscopic vision and a sense of gravity. Ghosts from surrealist painting, symbolist poet- ry, science fiction literature, classic and contemporary music are awakened and affectionately carried into a syncretic composition, a synesthetic experience, a polyphonic forest of sounds, signs, symbols and images. They are invited, like the audience, to a ritual of joyful mourning. Mourning is a mode of caring for the earth. Mourning is a celebration of the absent ones. Mourning is a spell to counter oblivion. Mourning is a longing to be together. Mourning is a political gesture. Mourning is an ode to gravity.

Landscapes are never discovered, never explored, necessarily already there, necessarily always re-composed and re-invented. A possible beginning.
Total darkness. The cameras’ observation of a systematic rhythmic breaking down bus in the noon day sun is projected on a white soft screen – with a borrowed sound stitched within. purna virama (the last stop), by Ujjwal Kanishka Utkarsh. Indigo Night, by Tamino. Total darkness. Phosphorescent floating drawings, velvet gloves shining silver, little geometric holes in the floor, a dance carpet that is a brick wall, cinematic cold light. The piano plays a balladesque nocturne with thunder and fireworks, with an unsettling three- dancers unisono, with skillful literal and figurative gestures, with scintillating surfaces. Mégalithes, by Gérard Grisey. Nocturne in c minor, op. 48 1, by Frédéric Chopin. Snake-Butt. Witches. The harp. The fauna-foot. Flying plates. The log. Jazz. Heron. Ribs. Socks. Depot sale. Leaning. The unisono ends in rest, in line. And is reborn as a trio.

Death by Landscape, a concert hosts accomplices, present and absent. They step into each other’s works, at times overlapping one another, at times sliding into each other, at times falling for each other, at times colliding with each other, at times mirroring each other. The piece weaves an undulating texture, made of repetition and echoes, of extension and contraction, of derivation and translation, of dissymmetry and reversibility, of silences and gaps. In between a movement and an image, between a sound and a dance, between a surface and a body, between what is seen and what is meant, a relation of infinite possibilities appears. For a moment transformed into polysemic infinity, endless possibilities, the link that we assume and impose between things and their signification float and the state of things never returns to what it was. And this is where mourning and future begin.

I want to sleep there
until my flesh
becomes music.
– Ocean Vuong, On Earth We ’re Briefly Gorgeous, 2019