Duet with Christiane Hommelsheim
Deutschherrenkapelle Saarbrücken, KUBA Münster, 2000
Original length 35 minutes
Performance / Video: Walli Höfinger & Christiane Hommelsheim
Camera: Gudrun Esterer
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It was never more beginning than now.
This Performance is a multi-media dialogue between two artists in space about themes of being and traveling in time, presence, rhythm, memory and parallel worlds of emotion. One structural sound-element of the performance is a rhythmic, choral soundscape created live with a loop-machine by Christiane Hommelsheim. It plays with the words "One, two, three - four, five, six.... twenty four hours" and recurs at different moments of the performance. Another recurring element is a very loud, very deep, 50-hertz tone. When it fades away, it creates a special quality of silence which opens the space for the next sequence. Parts of the performance are a breath-rhythm duet, when Christiane Hommelsheim uses the sound of her breath to improvise on Walli Höfinger’s live breathing sounds while rope-jumping. Meanwhile, the screen behind her features the image of a permanent act of writing overlaid by a dynamic image of fire. The image symbolizes the idea of a "script": The body as the aspect of us which permanently "writes down" or registers everything in us, a process which continues as long as we live. Another level of association is to "chase after something" without ever stopping, to be "chased by the devil". In the next sequence Walli Höfinger spins to the sound of a writing/scratching pencil, spinning more and more wildly to the point of physical exhaustion, collapse. With her body-voice-text improvisation Christiane Hommelsheim enters the extremes of human emotions and states, an emotional journey into the past and the future, which meet in the subjective "Now", the moment. After all the restlessness and extremity the performance ends with the sentence: "I was just thinking about you right now..." referring to the fact that all our states and emotions are lived subjectively in time and are ultimately relative.
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