FINALITY'S AN ASHTRAY (2019)

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Finality’s an Ashtray is a performance as car crash, a meditation on inputs and consumption.
It is scored as live performance for camera, which has audience as witness,
and formally superimposes of 3 sonic ‘spaces’ into one - a stage with speaking performer,
an unseen instrument heard amplified from another room, and a live, variable chorus.
With an open question of finitude, it is digestive in its flexibility of staging, shifting and
adapting to also hold the context it is in.

In this 2019 solo theatrical version, a recording of a band rehearsal from 2018 is streamed
from a speaker below the audience bank, and is pulled by rope to behind a table that much of the text
is performed on. The theatre's soundsystem initially amplifies midi arrangements, and gradually the
field recording is also respatialised in this system, as well as the progressively amplified voice of Cheng.

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performance, text, arrangement, costume, light - Ivan Cheng

pumice glass instrument - Eric Pipien

featuring 'A Burning House', 'Saintly Prince', and 'A Well' by Marcus Whale.

appearing with previously unheard, original midi accompaniments by IC (2015),

and rehearsal recordings with the 'Standard Stare' team (2018) - Gailė Griciūtė (prepared piano), Julia Reidy (12 string guitar), Marcus Whale (amplified voice, mixer).

Koepelzaal, Het Huis Utrecht
Feb 11-12, 2019