Mother [...] Mother (Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, June 22, 2024) 

Mother [...] Mother
Trio for performer, flautist and technician
A translational performance piece working with and through Samuel Beckett's "Footfalls"
Performed by Savika Ngoentong, Cari Ann Souter, Saun Santipreecha
Performance system engineered by Luc Trahand
Performed at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary at the closing of Saun Santipreecha's solo exhibition "...These Things That Divide The World In Two..."
|
It has been incredibly emotional working on this performance piece-translationally working with and through Samuel Beckett’s ‘Footfalls’-over the past months and having the exhibition close with its final permutation in this form. Without a doubt, it was one of the most challenging works I’ve created and having the honor of my mother embodying May (and more, as curator @objet_a.d puts it) has been so deeply moving as from the beginning, this piece was conceived for her. After a long struggle, the key to the work came in the form of a transposition-or rather a re-embodied abstraction-using the ‘materiality’ of music itself to embody the constriction and permutation of trauma via the tension between tonality (and the inevitable shadow it casts, not unlike trauma, upon a subject in process) and its historical counterpart, atonality. The ‘voice’, here disembodied from the subject who cannot herself speak, and yet speaks profoundly through her body, begins in free atonality before itself succumbing to its own systematization (the twelve-tone system). By this point (Act III), the system-adopted subject cannot help but be tethered (by our perception as spectators) to the constricted dictation of tonality (a rotating trio of chords often associated today with the ‘emotional’, the ‘epic’: Db - Fm - Eb). Against this, we cannot help but judge the solo notes in relation to its counter-system and so the ‘gaze’ of one is constricted by the Other, neither able to escape from the other’s shadow.