Groundwork Θ

Groundwork Θ starts from two assumptions. Music and sound can turn a space, unnamed and general, into a particular place. And the body is a place too, as are the places where a player touches their instrument, the room in which one listens, the city and the land. The piece asks how these places come together, orbit and collide.

Its material comes from sound walks along the borders of Israel: field recordings of the ground itself, made along the dividing line. Heard this way, the border is no longer a limit one should not approach or cross, but instead becomes a place with its own thickness and volume. Sound also reveals how human the border is: the weather does not care about it, and the elemental sounds, like all other non-human creatures, almost completely ignore its fences.

Within the hall, the recordings played from the four corners of the stage as a spatial score for the ear. Twelve musicians in two groups walked slowly through their half of the stage, steering by these sounds and playing fragile, unstable materials such as delicate multiphonics and fricative sounds. Down the middle ran an invisible border, closed to feet but open to sound. What each player played depended on where they stood, how close the others were and what they heard. They were told not to react to sounds from the other side. They often did anyway, and the two groups fused into a single drone across the imagined divide.

Between choreography, performance and composition, the piece tests the thresholds between the performers, the stage, the hall and the place where it stands. The audience sits inside this constellation, caught between sinking into the sounds, which can be enticing, and knowing where they come from: the unsettled borders of Israel, Palestine and Lebanon.

Θ (tet), the ninth letter of the Phoenician alphabet, marks the archaic origins of the problem of "working the ground" (after Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology, 2016).