WHEN GHOSTS WILL DIE
description
"When Ghosts Will Die" involves one-two performers and envisions
the space as a 3D grid simultaneously within a central computer and a physical
performance space. The performers move through this environment and evoke the
multi-sensory elements with hand-held tracking devices and in so doing interact with
these elements through three potential phases of nuclear proliferation: 1) Disharmony,
2) Destruction, and 3) Disintegration. These three phases are intended to evoke the
first nuclear explosion, the "Trinity" test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, that took
place just weeks before the nuclear bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
Using the tracking device, the performers can move through the space choosing the
element they wish to utilize for telling the story. In this way, the story takes on a
rhapsodic quality: it is literally stitched together "on the fly" and changes wtih each
telling. The mood of the space is designed to match the phase that the performers reach.
Disharmony, for example, offers slightly discordant sounds that increasingly give way to
cacophony, as well as video footage representing growing belligerence. Destruction sees
the dropping of the bombs and corresponding sounds of buildings falling into rubble. The
final phase, Disintegration, takes performers to the motif of the work: that the
destruction derived from these weapons will be so complete that even "ghosts will die,"
an allusion to Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" that sits at the heart of this project.