The Sound of Space Between Us

the setting:

This piece for multi-tracked violin was written for Camilla Caldwell for the 1:2:1 Festival in January 2021, marking the birth of a beautiful collaboration-ship after being randomly matched (thanks Nick Photinos!).

the story:

This piece centers on the the idea of someone with whom you’ve shared the deepest history and most private moments, and then after separating, they suddenly become “part of the public,” with a past present between the two, yet invisible to everyone else. Between two parted people once connected lies an unspoken yet ear-splitting link “heard” by no one else but them. Two voices, two hearts, two minds, interconnected by a shared past in silent dialogue that is deafening, and seems it should have a sound. Each story between people has its own silent soundtrack, and I aim to make it sonically material.

I like to use memory as a compositional device because the one commonality everyone shares is all having a distinctly different personal lineage of memories, experiences, people that can never be replicated. That path traced is traced by only us. Especially living in NY, I’m hyper-sensitive to and aware of individuals’ stories we catch little glimpses of, revealed in subtleties: a smile to oneself on the sidewalk, a shimmer of a tear beneath a mask on the subway, a bouquet of flowers in hand, an expression of distress flooded by a lit screen on which fingers frantically type...all these things turn anonymous passersby into people with their own stories, their own lineages, that continue far beyond our brief single encounters with them.

I wrote this piece with my own form of this story in mind, but it’s also meant to adapt to the performer’s as well. It involved an experience collaborating with a former partner, post-parting. In a new phase of co-existing, they asked me to create a movement response to their installation. Based on the LED signs’ intimacy-driven text, the private and personal automatically interlaced with the public and performative, being in a gallery and for a film. A collage of 5 slightly different takes, my choreography embodied traces of emotions, moments and gestures resurrected from memories, using what I had before me: signs, text, wires I used as “lifelines”, and my collaborator standing just out of frame. There was no shield between me and an anonymous audience; only us and a camerawoman, with my raw corporeal voice as a lens into the past, letting my body go, exposing every vulnerability I had. Though physically a solo, it was a trio with these other forces at play, constantly shifting between past and present, with me in a sort of middle; dancing with the ghost of what was in a body that endured the reality of what became. What happened, what I accepted, and my body as an artifact of both. That push-and-pull is the core of this piece, achieved by the multi-tracking of a single voice.