Tanzquartier Wien

A single, bright tone carries through the room. The frequency of its oscillation increasing, it slowly spreads and interferes with new sounds that appear almost unnoticed, creating an ever denser soundscape whose vibrating fabric, interwoven with synthetic sounds, sets the room in motion, expanding its boundaries. As if in a spontaneous reaction to the intensive act of listening on the inside, the perception is directed towards the outside as well, so now the eyes wander with increased attentiveness over the musicians on stage inconspicuously going about their business. It seems as though the sounds had eyes and opened them now to bring images and tones together in a moment of mysterious recognition that somehow manages to reach into the past as well as into the future.

Commissioned by Wien Modern, Limina is a nearly 46-minute chamber-music piece for electric guitar, saxophone, synthesizer and percussion created in 2021 by composer Mark Barden, who was born in the USA in 1980 and lives in Berlin. Performed by Ensemble Nikel with an outstanding international line-up at its world premiere in TQW Hall G, the first of three parts evokes a kind of lasting state of suspense, which may also be described as a, well, liminal experience. The transparency of the gently resonating and imperceptibly alternating sounds which finally become a pulsation, evokes a state of neither-nor while the excitement builds: the dissolution of the customary into an unstable state of transition, which, precisely because of its unpredictability, carries the nucleus for the transformation of a status quo of whatever kind.

It is not only the expansion of the sound spectrum and the gradually increasing dynamics of the darkly swelling sounds that make the existential apprehension contained in this flow-like state palpable, but also the metaphorical use of light in this concert. The stage is draped in black and empty except for the musicians arranged in a semi-circle with their instruments; while initially brightly lit, it falls steadily into darkness, all colours fading. The bright pink, green and yellow of the instrumentalists’ colourful T-shirts is transformed into a diffuse grey, not unlike percussionist Brian Archinal’s graphite-coloured muscle shirt, which reads SILENZIO in capital letters: a threat but also a promise that slowly fades in the dark.

Accordingly, the delicate blowing and smacking sounds Patrick Stadler coaxes from his saxophone are soon drowned out by rotor noises and accelerating percussion sounds that build up like a gradually surging storm, nay, like the all-devastating noise of war, into a threatening acoustic wall that appears to come ever closer. The perception of time suddenly seems paradoxical, its accelerando and simultaneous standstill, the effect of an extreme intensification of acoustic associations. The noise of brakes, screeching, stomping and the distorted sound of human voices, rattling, gargling and breathing.

Unexpectedly and persistently, a single tone generated by Yaron Deutsch with a violin bow on his electric guitar is set against this threateningly swelling steamroller of sound. The glassy tone oscillates, branches out, is then superimposed by a cracking like dry, snapping branches, and dies away when the sounds of the synthesizer (Antoine Françoise) flood the room with brute force: a dirty-grey mass of distorted electronic sounds with a nervous pulse slowly emerges, accompanied by noises calling wailing sirens and distorted cries of lamentation to mind. They slowly penetrate the listener’s body. The low tones of these sound waves increase the pressure and even make the auditorium floor vibrate. The monstrously spreading sound of destruction has long since crossed the edge of the stage and developed into a threat that reaches into the physical. It is a frontal attack on the senses that makes the act of hearing tangible down to the innermost layers of tissue of the body. All of a sudden the sound dies down, except for a few tones. Then a figure materialises in the dark at the edge of the stage and takes up a position with her legs apart in the semicircle formed by the musicians.

This is choreographer and dancer Ligia Lewis, who was born in the Dominican Republic in 1983 and lives in the USA and Berlin. Wearing a white T-shirt and blue tracksuit bottoms, her entire body begins to vibrate with tension, as though the sound waves that just ebbed away were reverberating inside of her. As if in slow motion, she opens her arms in a large, inviting gesture, while loud, electrically amplified breathing sounds are coming from her wide-open mouth. The acoustic highlighting lends an abstract emphasis to the sounds that alienates them from the body that produces them. Twisted in pain, the dancer tilts her head up while still looking at the audience, as her fingers move up and down invitingly.

Sensation 1 is the title of Ligia Lewis’ performance created back in 2011 and reworked in 2021 in a conceptual collaboration with Mark Barden, whose piece Limina in turn was created as an homage to Sensation 1. However, Lewis’ solo of about 24 minutes is not performed alongside Barden’s composition of almost twice the duration but subsequently and mainly without music. As a result, it comes across as a silent but no less powerful echo of the sounds that just filled the stage and auditorium with a threatening vehemence a moment ago.

In Sensation 1 Lewis refers to the video recording of a concert by Whitney Houston from 1999, in which the star sang the multi award-winning hit I will always love you with startling intensity at the height of her career. With a strong voice and utmost technical precision, she created a dialogue with the audience, evoking the community-building power of gospel, which was at the heart of Houston’s beginnings as a singer. By using some of the singer’s iconic gestures, slowing them down markedly and conveying them with tremendous inner tension, Lewis not only deconstructs the image of an icon of recent pop history but also makes reference to the person behind the mask of a star, and thus also to herself, beyond representation: a woman whose identity has been shaped by the experiences of many generations of Black women, marked by degradation, violence and exclusion. Against this, Houston set her self-empowerment as an artist, which makes her breakdown and early death all the more tragic.

Almost imperceptibly, Lewis’ face, distorted into a silent scream, turns into a radiant laugh. With her open arms raised high, she gradually clenches one hand into a fist, ready to strike, a gesture which in turn morphs into one of defence. Facing the audience with a look of astonishment, she stretches her hands out towards them, now kneeling. Once she has slowly got up again, her body vibrating, the sounds of Ensemble Nikel gently increase in volume and penetrate the silence, which until now had only been filled with the sound of her breathing, and as the stage lights keep getting brighter, Lewis’ fists open in the triumphant final gesture of a star – an image as if for eternity.

Since Lewis’ sculptural dance performance and Barden’s continuously transforming music are juxtaposed and neither art form is subordinated to the other, a tension arises from their temporal sequence that allows the two forms of expression to comment on, illuminate and expand each other. While watching, Lewis’ fluid gestures between submission, resistance and triumph combine with the recollection of Barden’s composition – which incorporates and musically transforms the ambiguous signs from the performance – and induce reflection: in this constellation rich in associations, a mental space opens up to the audience, which forces them, too, to question their own position within hierarchical structures in this seemingly endless game of transformation and revelation.

While Barden’s and Lewis’ approach breaks down the normative configurations of watching and listening in favour of exploring the situational moment, thereby creating an imaginative space between body and sound, they also create a moment of productive insecurity in the process. Since music and dance in Limina/Sensation 1 do not follow the conventional rules of representation and, moreover, only make these visible through their complicity, the audience find themselves in a kind of flow between the two worlds, as a result of which the inner and outer alienation Lewis conveys by separating body and voice can be experienced as being capable of change: the maltreated but no less resistant physical substance of humans in Lewis’ piece transforms with the delicate guitar sounds of rebellion in Barden’s work into a utopian moment that calls the supposed reality into question and carries the possibility of real action within itself: arising from the silence of mysterious self-knowledge.

Christina Kaindl-Hönig studied theatre studies and philosophy in Vienna. She was a lecturer at the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna from 2009 to 2018, as well as Dramatic Advisor at the Salzburg Festival. Her monograph Theater ohne Illusionen. Georg Büchners Ästhetik der Emanzipation was published in 2011. She works as a theatre scholar, theatre critic and freelance writer. Publications in specialist journals as well as in Austrian and international print media. Frequently serves as a panel judge for theatre and literature.