Rebecca Saunders / Unsuk Chin

Cut, tear, break, rip open, pierce the skin or flesh; mortify, grieve, offend. Of violence, disfigured and defaced. A lesion ingrained on the marred skin, a mark of difference. The imperfect surface, frayed edges, cracks in the veneer. The implication of vulnerability: the exquisite fragility and imperfection that makes us human. Silence is the canvas on which the weight of sound leaves its mark. Sound rips open the surface of silence, or peels back its skin, zooms in, and falls into the netherworld, seeking that which lies within.
“This corporal revenge. A genuine, concerted and systematic undoing of grace. Every promise discovered too late to be a fucking lie told badly. The promise of intimacy and the promise of beauty ripped away to reveal a gawping, hyperreal brute... Every follicle a valve or a thin brass pipe in some vast, breathing instrument... I wanted to speak of a cursive comprised of a single, sweeping line—written in skin, on skin and under skin; a line of dead, tinted, coiled skin, drawn on to the most sensitive ground. Held in place in raw, dermic proximity.”

Rebecca Saunders

This is a work that creates a unique and kaleidoscopic union between orchestra and female voice. Inspired by Lewis Carroll's famous masterpiece, the piece concentrates in eleven short scenes and twenty-three minutes of performance the work that Unsuk Chin, a South Korean composer living in Berlin, dedicated to the adventures of Alice in 2007. The young Australian soprano living in Berlin Siobhan Stagg, the original voice of the piece, interprets the libretto written by Unsuk Chin in collaboration with the American playwright, screenwriter and librettist David Hwang.