Issue link: http://floodesign.uberflip.com/i/868427
Paper walls rustle and then roar with the sound of thunder— suddenly the room is electrified, vibrating unnaturally. Audience members turn their eyes upward and search for answers within the canopy of silicon, but this too begins to transform from object to organism, stretching and breathing until its skin is gossamer thin, radiating with light. This sight informs the sound of metal grinding on metal: it scratches eardrums and locks up jaws. Hidden in shadows at the edge of action is a human player cranking at a ratchet, winding in a long length of airplane cable that whips and nearly tears the silicon hide that it pulls. The performer draws a bow over the cable once it is taut, coercing from it the frequencies of a double bass alongside the metallic scream of its internal tension. Sense memories are stored in the body as an aggregate phenomenon, waiting to be called back into lived experience. How many of these sensations remain hidden from us, buried beneath the sediment of more accessible, easily translatable knowledge? "The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects," a collaboration between the siblings Ashley and Adam Fure, thrusts us back into their presence. Airplane cable, poured silicon, reverberating Ashley Fure in residence at the Alexander Kasser Theater. Photo: Marina Levitskaya "The Force of Things" Photo: Marina Levitskaya subwoofers — aspects of these materials slip under the guise of things that we know well and, in everyday contexts, can easily understand. However, it is in their abnormality that these "things" hold our attention, leading us into a world all their own. That wire flitting across the stage appears to be industrial cable performing its normative role as a tool of conveyance, but also as a tremulous boundary between the audience and the fleshy latex suspended overhead, a menacing weapon and multiphonic instrument. There is a pitched urgency in the grating of the wires against the crank, the anxious way it slaps against the latex. When it finally sings, it sings to us of its agency, its poetic possibility. Why do forms (signs, symbols, literature, art) exist if not to temporarily seduce and captivate this extraordinary force? Breath, fire, air, spit, intonation, detonation, thunder, bombardment, collapse, explosion: force is inchoate life pushing against the inertia of form. What happens when we depart from that entrenched Western focus on the human-centered desire to be "well known" — 18 www.peakperfs.org WHEN YOU'RE