STORY
1996

Story is a mixed-media work that intertwines music, video, and theatre to explore the rhythms of life, shaping abstract ideas into a dynamic, sensory experience. Section One: Through a Wall of Flesh This opening movement mirrors the organic progression of life itself. Musical phrases behave like contractions—halving in length while doubling in tempo three times, simultaneously building in dynamics. Much like the process of cell division, pitches evolve from a single unison A, gradually expanding to encompass eight notes of a diminished scale. Visual elements reinforce this sense of emergence, with projected images of seeds within fruit bleeding light and color across the performers. Vocalists utter wordless vowel sounds, creating an atmosphere of mysticism and ethereality, drawing the audience into a world of transformation and possibility. Section Two: The Profound Verse of Our Time In stark contrast to the first movement, this section shifts focus to the spaces between life's grand events—the cycles of the everyday and mundane. With a touch of irony, the text revolves around seven prosaic activities: cooking, walking the dog, watching television, shopping, sex, making a telephone call, and catching a bus. Most of these moments unfold silently in the projected video above, reinforcing their quiet inevitability. Musically, phrases of half-spoken/sung Sprechgesang overlap as each vocalist delivers their own account with unwavering conviction, ultimately returning to the sentence they began with—suggesting an endless, inescapable loop. A chattering effect emerges and dissolves within the layered rhythms, creating a fleeting yet immersive movement that propels the audience forward. Section Three: Pulling Out the Plug The final section revisits the first—but in reverse. A bath slowly empties in the projected video above, a visual metaphor for release and resolution. Once more, ethereal vocal textures rise from an initial unison A, expanding both upwards and downwards to form dense harmonic structures. Throughout, earlier harmonic and rhythmic ideas reappear in new shapes, including fragments of text from the previous section. After a deceptive stop on a harmonically distant A-flat, the ensemble realigns around a unison A—bringing the work to its final conclusion.