THE HOUSE OF BREATH // ensemble, 35mm slide projections, electronics, voiceover (duration: 11'30")
VIDEO EXCERPTS, 7'
"The House of Breath" was written for ensemble Nieuw Amsterdams Peil and is a work about the memory of a particular space - a childhood home. The piece includes original slide projections of my own childhood home, with nearly all people (and animals) erased from the photographs, leaving only a ghostly spatial backdrop of a childhood. There is also a voice-over (performed by Genevieve Murphy) that attempts to reconstruct the space, using the photographs, moving from the outside inward. It starts off describing the garden and the exterior of the house, then the living room, kitchen, and finally arrives in the attic where a small room has been made for a child. By this point, some very minimal fictional elements have been introduced into the piece with a few quotes from the book "The House of Breath" by William Goyen (1950). Allusions are made as to why the child is absent from all the photographs. It's a cinematic, atmospheric piece meant to function a bit like a film without ever presenting actual moving images, leaving it up to the audience to create the final movie in their minds.
"The House of Breath" was performed in 9 concert hals and theaters in The Netherlands, as part of a tour with composer Michel van der Aa and singer Wende Snijders.