I had a great chance to experience some uniquely local high culture last night at the world premiere of Reaching For Nothing: Water's Thirst, a brilliant multimedia piece by composer Peter Hatch and architect Dereck Revington (who, incidentally, designed the much-discussed brilliant aural suicide-barrier at the Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto). I'm not a reviewer, per se, so I'll leave that angle to the professionals (at least in pre-review format). This was an event that both because of the local talent and because of the venue -- Waterloo's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics -- worked as a marvelous piece of site-specific art.
My fantastic experience at this event perhaps attests to the truth that a performance works best when the observer becomes personally immersed in the presentation. On a physical level, the set was explicitly designed to encourage such immersion. Sound sources, both live and electronic, were dispersed throughout the small hall -- which seemed a perfect venue for this piece. Through clever use of lighting, drapes, and a wee bit of dry ice, visual sources were similarly dispersed through the room at times, enhancing one's feeling of being inside the performance and sharing in it at a more intimate level than that of the viewer. I think I first noticed this when I discovered that the sounds of my own breathing were at first a distraction to me -- yes, it was just this quiet in the hall full of rapt attendees -- but then somehow joined on to the performance to serve as yet one more reminder that I was not on the outside peeking in at something, but rather was an integral part of it.
The performance itself was an extensive meditation on space and time so again a perfect fit for a physics institute and also close to my own intellectual leanings. Lately, I've spent much time thinking about some of the connections between the two domains. We use space and time interchangeably sometimes, in trying to understand our own place and impact on the planet. My own favourite and slightly daffy example of this is the time that I once asked a street person for directions and his response was to wave his arm in the correct compass direction and to grunt "It's about two cigarettes from here." More fundamentally than this, though, I've wondered how our generally weak grasp of the geometry of the connections between places might relate to our perceptions of time. I have a colleague who has shown that brain-injured people who suffer from a syndrome referred to as "neglect" in which they act as though the space on one side of their body is missing also have inabilities to estimate time accurately. Like many people, I have a disturbingly good grasp on time of day, but become fuzzy very quickly about more remote events (did something happen last week or the week before? Deciding on an answer to a question like this can involve some tricky mental acrobatics). I've also wondered about the connections between the patterns of space that we find soothing and restorative -- natural settings, forests, water and the patterns of time contained in natural sounds and in certain types of music. And also the connections between the two. A part of the epiphany of nature that I wrote about a few days ago was my sense that in nature the sights and sounds fit together with the kind of coherence that one just doesn't find on a city sidewalk.
Sharing a beautiful multimodal space with a group of talented performers and designers last night gave me a perfectly comfortable little cerebral nest into which I could snuggle and contemplate this interesting set of ideas and to explore their connections as if watching a dance of waves on an ocean beach.
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