ghost, breathing into being [2022-23]

two performers playing bowed cardboard objects [30’]

commissioned by Winnie Huang & Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn (aka duo hoodwink)

performance history

7/19-21/2023 - Recording Session Residency. hoodwink. EMPAC. Troy, NY

6/7/2023 - hoodwink. SMOG Concert Series. Brussels, Belgium

6/3/2023 - hoodwink. Echoraum. Vienna, Austria

program note

In ghost, breathing into being’s hushed, respiratory, susurrating soundworld is a secret seance. The performers work towards the materialization of a ghost; they generate energy and momentum on their blunt instruments in hopes to coax out something beyond, something within, something elsewhere. Their work is focused, purposeful, urgent, but provisional. The ghost is elusive, the medium is volatile.

The piece is a reflection on how the past impacts and frames the present. How histories are entangled. How the absence of a person or a community shapes the world of those who come after. Specifically, the lost generation of queer people victim to the AIDS epidemic in the 80’s and 90’s created a very loud absence in the lives of queer folx in the decades after. This piece was written in the wake of much reflection on this, on how to commune with them, how to be present with them, and how I may contain them within myself.

Remembering, honoring, mourning... these are active, laborious, effortful undertakings. To remember someone is to work towards them, to reach towards them backwards in time, to bring them into being. To breathe them into being (the body itself as the site of visitation, as the medium).

The performers of this piece reach towards their ghost, working to coax out specific nuances within the saturating noise and granulation of the blunt cardboard instruments. To invite the ghost into the room; a queer seance.