UMBRA

Umbra is a one-act mul­ti­me­dia micro-opera for sopra­no and piano with elec­tron­ics and video. The core of the work is a stream of con­scious­ness oper­at­ing in three modes, in which the id, ego, and super­ego trig­ger dif­fer­ent response log­ics with­in the same person.

This arrange­ment pro­duces inner tur­moil and oscil­la­tion — desire, cor­rec­tion, com­mand; impulse, self-defence, judge­ment — with no sta­ble over­ar­ch­ing point capa­ble of bring­ing order.

The title umbra (Latin: shad­ow) denotes in optics the zone of total shad­ow: the result of a rela­tion­ship between three ele­ments — the light source, the occlud­ing body, and the receiv­ing sur­face (screen/observer). Umbra is not a mood of “dark­ness” but a pre­cise struc­ture of exclu­sion: the place from which the source is no longer whol­ly vis­i­ble. This tri­ad becomes in the work a mod­el of the psy­che: impulse as source, nor­ma­tive fil­ter as occlud­ing body, and con­scious­ness as the screen on which pro­jec­tions appear. In this sense “umbra” is also a metaphor for the Jun­gian shad­ow — con­tent that remains out­side aware­ness; the arrange­ment clos­es around it and push­es it into the zone of total shad­ow, from where it con­tin­ues to exert influence.

The work was cre­at­ed dur­ing the pan­dem­ic and received its world pre­miere dur­ing lock­down, with­out an audi­ence. It is a lament and a record of the psy­cho­log­i­cal state of one who is con­front­ed with the relent­less­ness of cause and effect: with­out the promise of relief or con­so­la­tion through nar­ra­tive. It reg­is­ters the pres­sure of the world at a moment of cri­sis — cli­mat­ic, civil­i­sa­tion­al, epi­demi­o­log­i­cal — as a per­cep­tu­al and exis­ten­tial expe­ri­ence that trans­fers to the appa­ra­tus of thought.

The stage is organ­ised as a pro­jec­tion arrange­ment. The pro­tag­o­nist is sur­round­ed by three screens — “holo­grams” of her­self — which mul­ti­ply per­spec­tives and reveal how a sin­gle per­son can gen­er­ate con­tra­dic­to­ry respons­es to the same event. The stream of con­scious­ness here is cut and assem­bled hock­et-fash­ion: three instances seize the helm in short stretch­es of time, so that the same thought recurs in irrec­on­cil­able versions.

Pro­gram:

Anna Jędrze­jew­s­ka, Aga­ta Dyczko Umbra

*world pre­miere

Per­form­ers:

Alek­san­dra Klim­czak sopra­no and elec­tron­ic pro­cessin­gAn­na Jędrze­jew­s­ka piano and elec­tron­ic­sLau­ra Adel video pro­jec­tion­sAga­ta Dyczko direc­tion­Wo­j­ciech Stanisław Skowronek libretto

Pro­duc­tion:

pro­duc­tion: Woj­ciech Błaże­jczykvi­su­al iden­ti­ty: Alek­san­dra Ołdak­sound engi­neer­ing: Woj­ciech Błażejczyk

The Hash­tag Lab Con­tem­po­rary Music Space is co-fund­ed by the City of Warsaw.

The media patron of the Hash­tag Lab Con­tem­po­rary Music Space is POLMIC​.PL and Dwój­ka Pol­skie Radio.

Tickets

40 PLN