FROM THE DEAD AIR ORGY: The Song of Silenus remixes Virgil, Conrad, cosmology and perversity, obliteration and the beginnings of time with the poetics of quantum gravity. Virgil’s Eclogue VI is re-imagined in a residency that inhabits hidden rooms above a shop of oenological and wine making. The work was developed over the course of three nights with no known outcome, as the space becomes an echo chamber to the poem and the erotic cosmology that surrounds it. Virgil’s book of ten Eclogues were written between 42 and 39 BC as a collection of interrelated pastoral poems. Each of the poems being very different in tone and structure, they combine the politics of the day with very distinct poetic voices. Eclogue VI tells the story of two satyrs and a Naiad who find the mythical Silenus, the teacher and companion to Dionysus, passed out drunk in a cave in Arcadia. They tie him up and insist he sings them a song. The song he sings to them starts with the beginning of creation and leads through a mythical landscape of disasters, passions and transformations.
Hidden within the work is the covert reconstruction of Bar Silenus - a location in Conrad's The Secret Agent where characters plan acts of terrorism and drink to the destruction of what is...
FROM THE DEAD AIR ORGY: The Song of Silenus present’s itself through three different portals: an online streaming channel that is broadcast from an installation within the building, that evolves over the three days and then a repeated performance that closes each night at midnight. These different works run in parallel with each other with different relationships to narrative and abstracted time and space.
concept, space and choreography Simon Vincenzi
performer Kath Duggan
sound Will Saunders
with the participation of Lucio Apolito, Valentina Cencetti, Irena Radmanovic
production assistants Paolo Gabriotti, Perla Degli Esposti
scenography assistants Filippo Tappi, Elia Amaducci
production Xing/Live Arts Week
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