As above, so below

In this performance I invite the audience into a sonic and tactile encounter drawn from Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics — specifically the story in which the entire universe once existed as a single point, and every being who would ever exist was folded into that same, undivided place. I read a passage from the story aloud, then ask the visitors to gather on a felted rug laid on the floor: a center, of sorts, echoing the point the story describes. Using tuning forks, I carry sound directly into the participants' bodies — the voice no longer only heard, but felt through skin and bone.

The work continues earlier research I have been developing through voice, ritual, and the physicality of sound, in my exploration of the Alpsegen tradition, where speech becomes song and the voice is sent outward to reach beings visible and invisible. Here that same instrument turns inward, toward a group: using sound and touch to make momentarily perceptible what Calvino's story states as fact, and what traditions like nada brahma and Bohm's undivided wholeness propose as a deeper structure of reality — that separateness is a condition of expansion, not a starting point. The tuning fork against the body becomes a small instrument of that return, a vibration shared between the many, at the rug that stands for the one point before the universe began to take things apart.