Text- / Image-Score / Direction > Penelope Wehrli ; Players > Rickie Eden, Sophia New, Paula E. Paul, Julie Randall; Music > Hans Peter Kuhn; Costums > Ellen Hofmann; Dramaturgy > Eva Hartmann
E m i l y on the rocks is an exploration into the world of the poems and letters of Emily Dickinson. The text-score, which amplifies the different voices of Dickinson and which picks up the stroboscopic rhythms of her language, was developed from single lines of text, to be handed over to the audience as material for their own associations.
Then there's a noiseless noise in the Orchard - that I let persons hear -
[Emily Dickinson an W. Higginson, August 1862 ]
The audience enters a cubic space and they find themselves surrounded by four large projection screens. On the screens they see animated text lines and shots from a bird's-eye perspective of the urban environment that surrounds the performance space. One of the sides of this panorama is a projection gauze, behind which four women sit or move. They speak or sing the text score in English and German or they write the text with the Alphasystem - a body alphabet of Jo Fabian - into the space. The women seem to exist in their own universe - hermetically isolated from the audience, physically present, but still more like another projection. A camera which is installed above the heads of the performers transfers their movements live into the panorama space.Each track follows it’s own time structure. The result is a polyphonic, multilayered ephemeral score of transitory complexity.