Vis-a-vis (2002), Katherine Bergeron, voice

What is the cause, and the cost, of insight? What does it mean to see the world face to face? These questions were raised by the young Rainer Maria Rilke in a passage from his Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a journal he kept in 1904 while serving as secretary to the sculptor Rodin. They also lie at the heart of Vis-a-vis, a multimedia work for voice and computer music soundscape, which takes Rilkes words as a dramatic point of departure. Recalling an encounter with a nameless woman in the streets of Paris, Rilke’s text is a meditation on the nature of faces. It reads like a drama, a story in five virtual scenes told from multiple points of view and in several voices, alternately droll, philosophical, ironic, pathetic. In this new 5.1 mix the multivocal and multilingual aspects of Vis-a-vis are highlighted through the use of acousmatic space; the aim is to suggest the shifting psychological relationship between the woman who sings and the nameless woman who is the subject of Rilkes narration.