Line of Oblivion

Premiere, November 2010

© Joji inc, 2010

In the night of the Mexican desert, an old man is abandoned. Sitting in a wheelchair, he is looking into the darkness. Is he forgetting his memories?

Is he imagining them or is he dying? He can’t move, he can’t speak, but he can hear and he can remember: try to remember.

The line described by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes is not only a line on the ground, a division between countries. It is a broken line in the memory, an empty space like any frontier, inhabited by the character of this story.

“An old man, with clothing whose labels have been torn off. An old man without a wallet, An old man with no identification:, no

passport, no credit cards, no voter registration, no social security card, no calendar for the new year, no green card to cross frontiers.

An old man with no plastic. An old man with a stiff neck. An old man with clear eyes open to the heavens, eyes washed by the

rain. An old man with ears open, his earlobes dripping rain. An old abandoned man. Who could have done this?” [From The Line of

Oblivion with the voice of Carlos Fuentes.]

The words of the writer Carlos Fuentes destroy and transform one another. All he leaves us with are images of the noise and the movement of a body fading into the desert.

An apt reference for forgetting. In this space – emptied of meaning – voice, clarinets, and viola d’amore create an sonorous event, a line to follow . A line of music, a line of sound, a line of dance, a line of video, a line.

The immobility of the massive surfaces of the desert is cut by the sound produced on the stage.

The movements of the musician

and the dancer in space reflect to the sonic trajectory, the same trajectory followed by the movement of the video images.

Carlos Fuentes,

The Line of Oblivion,

IVth chapter of the book

The crystal frontier

2010 - 2011  new performance for viola d’amore, 2 clarinets, dancer, actor and video