projects

Helicopters and butterflies
solo for an operatic percussionist based on "The Gambler" by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Commission: Festival d’Automne, Paris
First performance: 16-10-2012, Festival d’Automne, Paris
Christian Dierstein (set and percussions)
Publisher: Rai Trade
Duration: 15’ca

Ideation
The rhythmical movement of "The Gambler" consists of a complex accelerando of events proceeding ineluctably towards a tragic end; it is driven forward by the suspense arising from the key scenes at the roulette table. This is the dramatic engine of a micro-musical-theatre project in the form of a solo percussion performance.

The performer represents Dostoevsky's characters, especially the Gambler, who interact, fight and move about in a limited space — the hotel in the novel, the articulated percussion set in the concert.
The overwhelming sense of imprisonment, created by the density of events in the original plot and the writing itself, is reproduced and amplified by the performer limited acting space inside the overfilled percussion installation.
Between the beginning and the end of the performance, the complicated and mysterious connections between the seven people are clarified and developed, especially by the cataclysmic passion for roulette that ignites and extinguishes the hopes and fears of the entire complex group, represented in the piece by its realistic sound.

The Dostoevsky’s dramaturgy
The Gambler (and narrator) Aleksej Ivànovic, is a character full of determination and contradiction, addicted to the excitement of a game of chance and hypnotized by the roulette wheel. He is also desperately in love with the mysterious Polina Aleksàndrovna, a sophisticated young lady who is tormented by her authoritarian father, the General who would happily squander everything he owns to marry the beautiful and calculating Mademoiselle Blanche.
The co-protagonist is the babboulinka, the old grandmother, who appears mid-action, borne about on her chair by her servants, when everyone was counting on her imminent demise as the source of funds to pay for the good life they can no longer do without. She is a hot-tempered, energetic, charismatic and very intelligent 70-year-old who detests the whole family and denounces the duplicity of all their relationships, coolly resolving to lose all her wealth at the very roulette table favoured by the Gambler, whom she asks to be her mentor. Between them, these two, with their passion, their individuality, and the peculiar freedom that age or addiction can provide, ruin the entire family, while creating the same suspense as gambling itself does, a kind of suspense that Dostoevsky describes withthe verisimilitude of an expérience vécue.

Realization
Since the performer is the only source of music, he will create the musical and visual landscape by installing his set, using props and other objects to produce noises and special effects recalling the still life of the family.
Every object or percussion is part of an ideal global structure representing the scene of the little hotel where the Dostoevsky’s family and various friends are vacationing.
The aim is to create a sort of organic mechanism where the percussionist, the “Gambler”, sculpts the different “voices” of the novel and the voice of the roulette and its fatal actraction toward the apocaliptical end, producing stage noises and special theatrical effects.

His performance will explore the entire range of percussive nuances, making frequent use of extreme textures, with whispered accents like fluttering butterfly wings or dramatic explosion like a fleet of helicopters invading the space: two organisms scharing the same mechanism and esploring inaudible but specular sounds limits.

Photo:
Christian Dierstein ©Thomas Hammelmann