Sisyphus of the Ear

film-concert, 2016-17

Paulo C. Chagas (music)

Johannes Birringer (film)

Performed by Thierry Miroglio

The music of percussion instruments creates a powerful scenario of an imaginative journey of inner concussions and tremors. The instrumentalist is renowned soloist Thierry Miroglio.

A near-silent film – with an electronically augmented soundtrack of breath, moving stones, and speech sounds, deconstructed and distorted from the poem ‘Zang Tumb Tumb’ by the futurist artist Marinetti – is driven invisibly by the musician’s gestures which sustain and channel this audio-visual composition by Paulo C. Chagas and Johannes Birringer.

The visual scenario portrays an older man’s protracted and dangerous climb up a steep hillside in an abandoned quarry. The climb fails and the protagonist falls down and slides to the bottom, to repeat the climb over again. The images compose a study of futility (and an existential scenario indebted to Camus’ story on Sisyphus (1955) where he speaks of it being set against the “unreasonable silence of the world” here compounded by a [not visible] condition of an “inner wind” (vestibular disorder, tinnitus and hyperacusis). The audible conditions of the inner wind are kinetically evoked and dynamically and dramatically interpreted through the percussion instruments, and thus the aural and the visual engender each other’s restraint.

October 30, 2016         Ufa / Bashkir (Russia) Bashkir State Philharmonic Society.

November 2, 2016       Moscow (Russia)

November 25, 2016     Hong Kong

Further performances on international tour. 

Preview performance: October 26, 2016 Arts@Artaud, 7:45 pm Artaud Performance Center, London, with Kalid Puentes and Johannes Birringer on percussion.

This performance represents the second collaboration between composer Paulo C.Chagas and media choreographer Johannes Birringer. Their first digital oratorio, Corpo, Carne e Espírito, had its world premiere at the Klauss Vianna Theatre, BeloHorizonte, Brasil during the FIT-BH Festival 2008.