Commission to Anda Kryeziu

From one day to the next, the actress Elisabeth Vogler falls silent. The young nurse Alma takes care of her and tries to make her speak again. But while Elisabeth persistently remains silent, Alma confides ever more intimate thoughts and experiences to her. The relationship between patient and nurse becomes unbalanced. An obsessive relationship of mutual dependence develops between the two women, a game of power and powerlessness. In a mysterious process of mutual identification, the boundaries of their personalities become increasingly blurred until they finally collapse and merge. The two women engage in a desperate duel of identities and it becomes increasingly unclear whether they are two characters or two parts of a single personality.

In her chamber music theatre Persona, based on the film of the same name by Ingmar Bergmann, the composer Anda Kryeziu draws a musical psychogram of two women, one of whom speaks and the other remains silent. The chamber music theatre is commissioned by Theater Basel in cooperation with Gare du Nord and is supported by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

Persona thematises the absence of a meaning-giving language: the gaps in meaning or speech become more powerful than the words. The focus is on the acoustic imbalance of the characters, which manifests itself in the tension between speaking and silence as active acts. Elisabeth's refusal of vocal expression provokes Alma's vocal expressiveness – her confessions fade into an in-between space, the search for connection runs into emptiness and throws her back on herself again and again. The relationship of the figures is constituted on various levels in the composition: repetition, echo and loop structures, the diffusion and spatialisation of sound events and their decoupling from their sound sources. In addition to the psycho-acoustic inner worlds of Alma and Elisabeth, the physical closeness and intimacy of the figures creates another sound space that is explored through the use of sensors and contact microphones. Here a space of possibility opens up in which familiar physicality can merge into violation and violence and fall into one. The skin becomes a sensual contact surface between two individuals, but at the same time it is also their insurmountable separation. Last but not least, the project focuses on the human voice as a reflection and expression of personality and identity, which can indicate age, gender or even appearance. Here, the facets and limits of the vocal spectrum of expression are explored and become the catalyst of a constant process of transformation to which the subjects are exposed.

Further information:
theater-basel.ch

Dates

March 4, 6, 7, 15 and 16, 2023
Gare du Nord, Basel