VALSE
Based on the musical composition by Ernst Toch. Eight actors, 20 min.
The University of Chicago, 2005.

ABOUT
This piece was conceived as an exercise in shaping time and space in conversation with Ernst Toch's 1960 musical composition for eight voices. An attempt was made to explore the relationships between each of the individual bodies as material to be manipulated in ways similar to the sonic elements of tone, volume, pitch, rhythm, and tempo as expressed by Toch's Valse. The narrative developed as a result of physical and vocal improvisation techniques borrowed from a wide variety of traditions, including: mime, clown, Viewpoints, and ritual music practices of the Suya Indians of Central Brazil. Actors were encouraged to experiment with their physicality in ways which were unfamiliar and noncommunicative, thus ensuring their interactions with each other and the text to be impulsive and nonnarrative. This juxtaposition allowed for the story to develop independently of the meaning of the text, rendering a musicality and immediacy to the action that was much more compelling than would be a conventional "staging" of Toch's Valse.