Interruption 1989

Principal performers: Jai McHenry and Ion Pierce, Interruption 1989, performance, video and sound, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

In this work, a lecture begins in a small theatre, drawing on texts from the Western visual art canon. However, before the lecture can begin, a man enters stage right with two buckets, each half-full of steel chain, wire, and bolts. The buckets are placed; he noisily searches through the chains and bolts. The lecturer tries to draw his attention, but he does not stop. No words are spoken, only “ssh”, stares, gestures, and sounds such as the metal striking as the various materials are sorted. Both the person about to lecture and the noisy interloper become spotlit and freeze as the lights fade up on thirteen people seated a little upstage inside the proscenium and beneath a video projection (the chorus). The chorus is repeating a word, but without utterance; slowly, the word becomes audible. The word “Everyone” is repeated ad infinitum with each chorister keeping their own tempo, a wall of sound in a slowly increasing crescendo. The video took its rhythm from the chorus and was in a pop art style, featuring bursts of static and snippets (fragments) of American television advertising; the video had no audio. At the chorus’s loudest point (after 15 minutes), a male contralto sings the word “Dream”, heard through a now room-pitched, reverberant sonority. Dream is sung 4 times in an echoing ostinato, with each repetition dropping in volume and fading back into the room’s resonance; this cues a chorus diminuendo to complete the work.