SAFE 2021

**Premiered in 2018, much before the corona-crisis, SAFE sounds now strangely consistent with our daily actuality.
The current pandemic is causing waves of bacillophobia and fear of infection in our society.
In Todd Haynes’ film Safe (1995), a woman suffers from increasingly intense allergic reactions that ultimately make her life almost unlivable.
It is unclear whether she is a victim or an attention-seeking manipulator.**

*As both a concert and a performance, SAFE, inspired by the film, sketches an image of hypersensitivity*.
The contemporary Western world wants to find explanations for everything and so does the human mind.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live, says writer Joan Didion.
SAFE is an immersive journey into the human mind, constructed as a game between environmental influences and our own fragmented thoughts.Join this hybrid performance that will stimulate all your senses.**

**What starts as a concert gradually evolves into a sophisticated live audio play – a sound journey into the innermost being, a cognitive experience through headphones and binaural listening.
SAFE premiered in Kaaistudios in 2018.**

Programme notes of the premiere

One of the great dystopias of the twentieth century: everything is going very well, the specialists are on it,
explanations are followed by more explanations. However one woman continues to be obstinately and inexplicably allergic to everything.
Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready for a musical immersion in the source of the hyperexcitability of a silent and rebellious body?
Safe starts out like a live concert, but gradually transforms into a sound journey into the innermost being,
using headphones and the binaural stereo technique.

Safe is a performance centered around the use of the voice as a tool for communication and as gateway to a mental world beyond speech. It is a monologue that starts within the format of a live concert and then through the use of headphones transforms into an intimate auditory experience.

The first inspiration for this project was the Todd Haynes’ movie Safe (1995). In the movie Julianne Moore portrays Carol, a woman whose allergic reactions keep growing in intensity and duration making a normal life increasingly impossible. The inexplicable disease isolates her more and more and at the end of the movie we see Carol in the middle of the desert in a transparent high-tech igloo that is supposed to keep her protected from all the malignant influences of the external world. At its release the director himself referred to the AIDS epidemic and its political reception of the second half of the 1980ies. We think the movie has only gained critical importance at the beginning of the 21st century.

Because the causes of Carol’s symptoms are never revealed it remains unclear if she is suffering from a concrete physical ailment which the physicians are unable to identify or if her disease is totally psychosomatically induced. What we see is a body that loses more and more its autonomy and is manipulated by scientists, healers and shamans alike without it ever disclosing its mystery. In a control society where divergent behavior is more and more sanctioned and the desire of the total mastery of life is believed to be a possibility, Carol becomes an obstruction, a complication.
As an audience we are torn between considering her as the absolute victim (of an ecological crisis; within the grips of objectifying science or in the claws of twisted pseudo medical charlatans) or as a sophisticated manipulator who is craving for attention and refuses the world because she can.

The performance doesn’t want to be a literal transposition of the film or its script to the stage, but wants to put the mystery of the mute sick body in the center of the stage. The voice that comes out of this body alternates between echoing what is being said about its state of sickness by the world and producing sounds that refuse the conformity of language.

The performance is a hybrid experiment between performance and music theatre. The main focus will be the notion of 'hypersensitivity'. We are searching for the causes and symptoms of our times: depression, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, borderline syndrome, burnout, 21-century disease. Is it possible that our daily life inside the digital panoptikum (Byung-Chul Han) is marked by a craze for communication and consuming, self-optimizing, self-display, transparency that is leading into an abyss and possibly into a global mental collapse? How do we become hostages of our environment, like Carol White’s of today, test rabbits of sophisticated hidden power techniques?

PRESSCLIP