Mackenzie, N.K., 2003.

Calling Rachmaninov (Performance)

A sound, performance and video art collaboration between Plane Performance, Spencer Marsden, Kristin Scheving, the Concert Party and hAb.


In a darkened chamber a choir sing, unaccompanied. Against this the voices of 2 performers re-enact some intimate telephone exchanges, some real, some imagined, between strangers, between historical figures, between anonymous lovers. Their voices are digitally processed and manipulated, at times crackling and barely audible, at others intensely present and almost overpowering. The conversations and the music play across and against each other, as video images of a barely discernible figure lost in a modern city flicker on the walls, and 2 other performers begin to map out, quite simply, the private actions of a turn of the century Russian composer, fully aware of the time, and the place, and the audience...

Representing an unusual, if not unique, combination of arts practices, Calling Rachmaninov asks questions about the idea of musicality, the emotional impact of sound, and the place of narrative, and leaves these questions reverberating in one of the most stunning unknown buildings in the city.