Who can say what the world is? The world
is in flux, therefore
unreadable, the winds shifting,
the great plates invisibly shifting and changing—
Louise Glück, Averno

Many worlds exist, and more are yet to come. In The Rise, musical bodies, dancing bodies, singing bodies, create a new world from a series of poems by Louise Glück, Averno. The master of ceremonies is Ruben Grandits, a deaf actor, a wizard of translation, who circulates meaning between language, sign and sound. He guides the ten performers through the mouth of the volcano Averno, which is also the place of passage between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Before our eyes are then reinvented: new instruments, new musical harmonies, and a grammar, a rhetoric, even a politics.

—

In The Rise, composer Eva Reiter and choreographer Michiel Vandevelde focus on the coexistence and interchanges of various worlds as they unfold on stage successively. Thereby it is the process of translation that lead to the emergence of such new worlds. Throughout translating and re-contextualizing symbols, signs, gestures and sounds, new languages are created that eventually transform our perspective on a particular world.

At the centre of the piece appears Ruben Grandits, a young deaf performer who is the only person – although non-hearing – that is capable of transmitting the story to the public. His hands are equipped with sensors and therefore his movements are directly translated into sound. His signs, when speaking to us, serve as basic source for the world of sound and movement. Vice versa music is translated back into visual signs, making the piece also accessible to deaf people. The Rise focusses on echoes and mediation. It exemplifies modes of communication in which mediation can’t and shall not be avoided.

The Rise is based on the poetry of Nobel prize winner Louise Glück. Specifically her publication Averno serves as the main material for the libretto.  Averno, a crater lake in Italy, was believed to be the entrance gate to the underworld. In her poetry Glück connects and interchanges the two worlds of the living and the dead, returning from one to another and evokes images of life and death, of eternity and the profane. Similarly to the surface of the lake which serves as a permeable membrane into that parallel world, we will create parallel and intermediate worlds throughout the way these poems are performed.

Throughout the entire work we neither see nor hear any traditional musical instrument, but only newly constructed, self-developed ones that form the basis of the score and stage set. All instruments were developed with the aim to translate movement into sound directly—sometimes collectively. The ensemble consists of four dancers, four musicians, one singer and the narrator, forming an „homogeneous“ group with echoed material. All together they additionally form a „choir“, which takes on a decisive function in its collective role and increasingly stages itself as a new community.

Throughout echoing musical information to sign language – throughout mediating meaning in that sense – there are various ways to read and to access this work. The inability to understand individual aspects doesn’t represent a deficiency and does not need to be compensated, it rather represents the various points of views out of which we generate understanding.