Negative Ecstasies (
Trois études contre l’État policier fasciste) is a sculptural composition for seven vocalists. The work, a sort of anti-tone poem, is built around motifs of despair in relation to labor, industrialism, gore-capitalism, and the way these systems stress the subjects they encounter. Configured in response to the interior floor plan of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the score is tangentially based on the history and architecture of The Midland Building (“The Great Central Market”), the suicidal poetry of Foxconn factory worker Xu Lizhi, and historic union, labor, and coal mining songs. A flickering light might be a trill, a staircase might be a descencion or ascension of notes, where two walls meet might be a pulse between two notes, etc. In this way, the performers and the viewers experience the improvisational ensemble spatially, and never in the same configuration. The dead are sculptures that sing. ONE MUST BE PASSED OVER BY AIRCRAFT.
The body of the self-murderer and everything that comes in contact with it possess extraordinary magical powers. The iron beam a man hangs himself from can be melted down to make healing rings. Scraps of his clothing are rubbed on livestock to render them fertile and healthy. In Scotland, to cure epilepsy, the ill are made to drink from a suicide's skull.—from Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis: On Killing Oneself by Hermann Burger, translated by Adrian Nathan West
Performed by Courtney Mackedanz, Kim Upstill, Lizz Smith, Max Buzone, Micah Schippa-Wildfong, Noël Morical, and Ulysses Wildfong
Audio engineering and techinical support by Bonita Kaze, Haruhi Kobayashi, Matthew Test, Rafael Loza, and Sam Clapp
Photographs by Micah Schippa-Wildfong, Jack Schneider, and Drew Angle
Playbill
