When Day Became Night August 17, 2007

Combining Butoh dance, film, and original music for string trio and accordion, When Day Became Night, is a plunge into the underground world of the subways and the ancestral unconscious in order to bring memory to light. The Busker, a musician who wanders the labyrinths of the NYC subway system is haunted by the Bone Girl, the ghost of a victim of the Birkenau death camp. The omnipresent eye of the surveillance camera observes them as they traverse the perpetual subterranean night. Memories of death trains shadow images of the daily subway commute. Through her songs, the Busker observes the slow erosion of her body, a reflection of the urban decay that surrounds her, while the Bone Girl transmits to her the story of her death in the gas chambers.

Dark and resonant, the piece is inspired by the Noh Ghost Plays, Balinese cremation ceremonies that call spirits back into the body, and memoirs of a Birkenau camp survivor. Ultimately the issue is one of silence, and to what lengths one must go to break the binding power that silence has over personal and cultural histories in times of war. It is a meditation on collective memory, inherited pain, and the innate dream of light, beauty and wholeness that survives within our individual and planetary consciousness.

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