Mountain

Language shapes our structured world, but in fact every sentence we utter is an improvisation. That is the starting point for Orla Barry’s performance & sound installation. She has used 57 words, an actor, a dancer and a musician to devise a work in which chance, fate, and a little witchcraft play equal roles in a performance that is never the same on any night. It is a show of shows, set in a décor of language objects. These objects are used as script generators.

The performers spin the wheel; with each word a scene is constructed. The order is random and the performers are at the mercy of the wheel and therefore of fate. There can be no dramaturgy. There is no possibility of building tension or controlling the narrative and the performance could extend endlessly. It is a work that plays with different forms of text production such as: the speech, the monologue, the interview, the poem and the song in order to create a series of intentionally unplanned crossovers between text, object, meaning and performance.The performers jump from one character to another, from one atmosphere to another in arbitrary succession. In this collaborative work the performance act becomes a kind of mimesis. It arouses and purges each association nearly as soon as it has been constructed, leaving an ellipsis.

Ludwig Wittgenstein calls this "the inner visual room" in his philosophical investigations: "399-400: one could say: surely the owner of the visual room has to be the same nature as it; but he isn’t inside it and there is no outside. The visual room seemed like a discovery as it were; but what its discoverer really found was a new way of speaking, a new comparison, and, one could say, a new experience."

For the sound installation what is left is a scene without figures. Only the memory of their presence & actions exist through sound. Like the floating the voice-overs of Orla Barry's early video works the performance transforms itself into a tableau made of words. Ghost voices on an unplanned loop as broken language in space.