PASSION'S CONTENT (2020)

Live radio performance
approx. 20 minutes, 10 minutes Q&A

Passion’s Content is a music- and text-based performance piece written for Sarah Johanna Theurer’s show Portals on Cashmere Radio Berlin.
The piece deconstructs Henry Purcell’s baroque song If Love’s a Sweet Passion, revealing layers of gendered subtext in a sharp, though playful, close reading which draws on the performativity of language as a pliable tool of subject formation. As part of the project Radio-Activity, the show was streamed live from Lenbachhaus Munich.


EXCERPT:

If love’s a sweet passion why does it torment?
If a bitter, oh tell me, whence comes my content?
Since I suffer with pleasure, why should I complain,
or grieve at my fate, when I know t’is in vain?
Yet so pleasing the pain is, so soft as the dart,
That at once it both wounds me and tickles my heart.

I.
Whence comes my content, indeed
(as opposed to: wherein does my content occur)
when will it “fill me up”
the problem at hand is the lack of cóntent,
or the lack of satisfaction with contént.

The poetic narrator
-- whom we immediately identify as female
in the performance of the song,
because that’s what is
historically associated with a
high pitched singing voice --
is an empty vessel
she is desiring
(bottomless)
never full
not receptive?
numb?
lacking,
or rather,
leaking
-- dumb?one could also ask,
under which conditions can a female narrator
be meaningful,
find fulfillment?