PHACE | IRRÉALITÉS / UNREALITIES

Peyee Chen, voice

Thomas J. Jelinek, spatial conception,
media direction, lighting design

PHACE
Michael Krenn, saxophone
Spiros Laskaridis, trumpet
Mathilde Hoursiangou, piano
Maria Chlebus, percussion
Ivana Pristašová Zaugg, viola

SOUND DESIGN
Alfred Reiter

MEDIA
Peter Koger, video technics
Thomas Wagensommer, graphics programming
Christoffer Koller, edit & postproduction
Support: MediaOpera

“I have arrived in a place. I think I will stay for a while.”
[My only life]
Lisa Olstein, Lost Alphabet

In Lost Alphabet, Januibe Tejera explores those feelings between estrangement and new discovery that arise when moving or changing location, when the center of one’s life changes. The starting points are selected passages from Lisa Olstein’s volume of poetry of the same name, in which nature – as a constant reference and at the same time as a completely formless model – intertwines the real and the unreal. On this textual basis (voice: Peyee Chen), Tejera’s music approaches the continuous and natural processes of alienation experienced by those who commute between different countries, continents, social classes and cultural models, while at the same time entering into a musical dialogue with his country of origin. Embedded in a spatial-visual concept (Thomas J. Jelinek), the concert evening reflects a peculiarity of human beings, namely the ability to perceive and reflect on life as something external to oneself, accompanied by the total impossibility of understanding or assigning precise meaning to life. Like a language that we are forgetting while also learning it, like an alphabet that evolves while it fades — a lost alphabet that we try to comprehend.