Iris ter Schiphorst

Silence Moves (1997)

for the WP, BLAUE BRÜCKE competition, Dresden 1997

Silence moves is a kind of chamber opera for five musicians in motion, live electronics, lighting, recorded music and video projections, which plays with the multi-layered connections between seeing and hearing, signs and sounds.
However, this is by no means a harmless story. Rather, it is one of writing, absence and death.
And one of confusion. In which one sometimes no longer knows exactly where one is...; whether one is watching a radio play or listening to a film, whether musicians are performing or actors are giving a concert.
Silence moves is neither about providing musical accompaniment to images nor about 'illustrating' music, but rather a composition that requires both the eye and the ear to 'understand'. In other words, precisely those senses that interact most closely in 'our' alphabetic, phonetic writing – even if the role of the ear in reading or writing is often overlooked (writing always belongs to an invisible voice – as the secret ruler of the scene...).
In other words, it is not so much about the connection between image and music, but rather about the connection between writing and sound; about a 'staging' of the (history of) writing, which is also the (history of) language.

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