Iris ter Schiphorst
Silence moves (1998)
Libretto for "a kind of chamber opera for five female musicians in motion, live electronics, lighting, recorded music and video projections" (1998)
Information about the work
I. Someone is dead...
Someone is dead...
Where have you gone, friend of summer?
And the pictures we drowned in the air – oh, just in the air –
faded, yellowed, pale,
like your face,
which had been so thin,
given away
to an unknown God,
in vain,
forever,
simply wiped out.
II. The endless game of presence and absence
She is gone.
Is this the beginning of the game?
But what we do is murder.
She is gone.
This is the beginning of the game.
Arrived at the black signs.
Black signs of love, of murder.
Arrived at the boundless longing.
At the place that has always been.
At the writing.
You just have to accept it.
III. “1800”
They had thought of something for her,
something that was somehow perfidious.
They threw something at her, saying:
Here, you can have...
Take...
But it was a farce.
Because they needed something else.
Her mouth, for example.
Every nook and cranny was scrutinised and illuminated,
her larynx measured,
her vocal cords pulled apart.
She was to practise.
Every day. To speak
properly.
She said she wanted to write.
But they wouldn’t let her.
She said:
I must, I have something to say,
a sheet of paper, please ...
They wouldn’t let her.
They took her to a cell.
She was told to keep practising.
They said:
‘Your voice.’
And again and again:
‘Your voice.’
She opened her mouth
and stuck out her tongue,
but they could find nothing.
Her father peered through a hatch
and slipped a note through the door:
It’s all about music.
She stuck her tongue out at him too,
but there was nothing to be seen.
As her tongue was gradually withering away, they
brought water. They
carefully moistened her mouth.
But there was still nothing to be seen.
To be on the safe
side, they cut off her tongue
and stuck it onto a sheet of paper.
Insert 1
...I would stand in the middle of a dimly lit street, dressed
in black,
in an entirely black suit,
listen to me, beloved ...
facing the earth,
serious, impassive, motionless,
Beloved, do you see me standing there
, in the middle;
and gradually I would raise an arm,
and the light would fall upon me,
Beloved, look...
look as I gradually raise an arm,
look at the light, glaring down upon me;
and someone will come
and cut off the black sleeve from
my raised arm,
look...
look at the arm,
how it juts out from me, long, thin, bare and outstretched
in the spotlight,
its face turned towards the earth;
and another will come
and paint this long, thin arm white,
My dearest, hear me,
even more naked will this white, long, thin arm
reach out into the world,
leaning towards the face of the earth;
and another will come again,
and he will paint this long, white, naked arm
with a long, thin black stripe,
from the armpits to the palm;
look at this arm,
look at the face, bent towards
the earth;
and I shall raise my other arm,
and another shall come
and cut off the black sleeve from this arm too,
listen, my beloved,
and this arm too will stand bare and long
in the world,
do you see it;
and another will come
and he will paint this arm white too,
and again it will be even more bare than before,
and another will come
and paint a black stripe on it,
Beloved, can’t you hear how …
Insert 2
Yesterday they broke him out.
He had already lain there for fourteen days,
completely frozen, stiff, immobile.
Fused into this huge window,
between the abyss and the sky,
in this desert of ice.
There hasn’t been such cold
for decades.
That’s what the people here say.
And I –
I can’t believe it.
I think
this ice has always existed.
Incidentally, his face was
turned towards the sky,
a beautiful face,
delicate and infinitely pale.
For fourteen days, people
walked over that face,
üover those large, blue eyes
and that childlike forehead.
I don’t know who it was
who discovered him.
Suddenly, people came from
all over to look at him.
And everyone agreed that
he couldn’t be left there,
that he had to be brought
out of this icy wasteland.
At first they didn’t know how,
because the layer of ice was too thick.
Finally, they decided to
break the ice around him with pickaxes.
Four men
spent nine hours doing
this.
In the end, with the help of a crane
and long poles, he was pulled out of the
ice,
encased in his glass coffin.
In his place, a
black hole gaped for
a moment in this endless expanse,
as if the merging of water and sky,
of above and below, were possible
after all.
Today I walked past the
spot and there is already almost nothing left to see.
I lay down on the ice,
where he had been lying.
I looked up at the
sky and knew:
Somewhere deep beneath me is the water.
I felt the cold gradually taking hold
of me,
and a deep calm came over me.
For a brief moment, I
forgot everything.
IV: Silence Moves
Silence moves?
I’m not sure.
It’s probably all just about
connecting oneself
with the consequence of reality,
so-called speech.
I don’t know...
The only thing I know for sure:
I’m completely hoarse
from talking too much,
mutilated by a host of signs,
split and scattered,
a witness,
creating
the failure of speech ...
Noisy interludes flashing up intermittently, continuously:
1.: ‘...as a privileged example of the child’s language acquisition (noise) for the symbolic or linguistic mastery of sensations and drives.’ (Julia Kristeva, The Revolution of Poetic Language, 1974)
2: “The benefit gained through this play consists in pleasure, the question being what form pleasure can take in a gesture that ceaselessly repeats a displeasurable experience.” (Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920)
3: “The origin … of language … is based on loss, on the symbolic murder of the body, of the Real.” (Sigmund Freud)
4: “That was the entire game, disappearance and return, of which one usually saw only the first act, and this would be repeated tirelessly as a game in its own right, although the greater pleasure undoubtedly lay in the second act.” (Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920)
5. “Culturation is understood as entry into the economy of substitution, into the interplay of absence and representation, of disappearance and return.” (Julia Kristeva)
6. “...Discussions of the ‘here-there’ episode show that the maternal body becomes a site of death because her disappearance brings the notion of human mortality into play.” (Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, 1987)
7. “...the erased maternal body is preserved in its substitute forms, in the many objects of desire that...” (Julia Kristeva)