incidAnces

“incidAnces” is a monodramatic piece adapted from an existing set of short stories by the Russian absurdist and surrealist dissident writer Danila Kharms. Being neglected for a long time Kharms’s writings, stories, poems and philosophical texts are a pioneering works of this genre with “incidances” (1939) being his most famous work so far. His aesthetically heterogeneous hectic approach and constant atmosphere changing way of story telling was of particular interest to the composer. The original set contains much more stories and these seven are the composers personal choice, each of them being a single picture of a particular relation, situation or a collision of certain people or objects. Kharms possesses an immense talent for depicting the relationships between people as a sequence of follies lacking meaning and context, depicting them as accidental particles floating and colliding. These seven stories do not represent seven movements, but seven autonomous situations, encapsulations of certain time and space that all together make one meaningful and picturesque whole (totality). The singer has a role of a story teller, though her way of telling differs widely from a story to story. On the other hand she is not only story telling – on contrary, she participates actively all the time allowing herself to be subjective and affected. Depending on the context and the music itself she is in, she transforms from firm to frightened, scared to thrilled, speechless, shocked, hysterical and so on. Her actions are not always rational, as characters in Harms’s stories are anything but rational. Precisely because of that, this piece is not to be approached in a positivistic rationalistic manner and it is not to be understood as a conventional sequence of events, but rather to be intuitively felt.