Programme Note

In COLLAPSE, Alireza Farhang asks what remains when language can no longer contain experience. The work takes as its starting point a poem by Claudia Rankine, while Farhang himself writes the original text of the second movement. Countertenor, instrumental ensemble, electronics and images by Hugo Arcier inhabit a single theatrical space in which no element merely accompanies or illustrates another. Voice, instruments, images, staging and light continually reshape one another, blurring the boundaries between presence, memory and disappearance.

The work unfolds as a thirty-five-minute triptych. In Within, the full ensemble appears in a relatively familiar concert setting. Rankine’s words introduce a world of falling, touch, fracture and endurance. In Texture, the perspective narrows. Farhang’s text, conceived as a close-up rather than an adaptation of Rankine’s poem, stages an elusive dialogue between a Voice and its Shadow. The countertenor moves from singing towards spoken language, accompanied by baritone saxophone, viola and electronics, while the visual dimension becomes increasingly prominent. Words break apart into repetitions, consonants, breath and silence. The body itself seems to become unstable, evoking the tension and distortion found in the paintings of Francis Bacon. In Rise, the full ensemble returns in a spatially divided configuration. Language gradually disappears, leaving vocal gestures, resonance and the fragile impulse to stand again.

Bruno Boulzaguet’s staging and lighting make the performance space an active part of this transformation. Light does not merely illuminate the performers: it reveals, isolates and erases, continually shifting the relationship between the physical body, its projected image and the surrounding space. During the second movement, the stage gradually takes on the character of an interior chamber, drawing the audience into an intimate and uncertain encounter with the singer. In the final section, the spatial division of the ensemble and the changing light reorganise the stage once more, sustaining the work’s unresolved movement between falling and rising.

COLLAPSE does not tell a conventional story or offer a final resolution. It traces a transformation of perception. As text, sound and image begin to lose their separate identities, the audience is drawn from observing a figure into sharing an interior state. Collapse here is not simply destruction: it is the moment when familiar forms come apart and another kind of presence becomes perceptible, a breath, a vibration, a body that falters yet remains.