Vexa­ti­ons

„Vexa­ti­ons“ is a dura­tio­nal per­for­mance by musi­ci­an Eli­as Brown and dance artist Moni­ka Błaszc­zak, based on Erik Satie’s enig­ma­tic com­po­si­ti­on, writ­ten around 1893–1894. The score con­sists of a brief musi­cal the­me to be repea­ted 840 times, after the composer’s sug­gested pre­pa­ra­ti­on “in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.”
Com­po­sed during Satie’s invol­vement with the eso­te­ric Ord­re du Temp­le de la Rose + Croix, the pie­ce remain­ed unpu­blished during his life­time, only to be redis­co­ver­ed and pre­mie­red by John Cage in 1963. Brown and Błaszc­zak reim­agi­ne Vexa­ti­ons as a 12-hour work for solo dancer and pia­no. Satie’s decep­tively simp­le, wan­de­ring the­me is set against a mini­ma­list cho­reo­gra­phy whe­re the recur­si­ve repe­ti­ti­on of a sin­gle move­ment pat­tern gene­ra­tes slow, gra­nu­lar evolution.
The work invi­tes audi­en­ces into a den­se pre­sent ten­se, chal­len­ging the sta­bi­li­ty of our per­cep­ti­on in the face of an incre­asing­ly flu­id rea­li­ty. Can repe­ti­ti­on open a por­tal to trans­for­ma­ti­on? In homage to Cage’s ges­tu­re from the pre­mie­re per­for­mance, audi­ence mem­bers will recei­ve a one euro refund of their ticket cost per hour spent in attendance.