THE SPaCE BETWEEN (2019)

DIRECTOR

DESIGNER

The Space Between is fully staged performance work for string quartet. Composed by Lisa Renée Coons in collaboration with DeChiazza, for the renowned Spektral Quartet. The 75-minute piece explores the power dynamics of performance, and embodied sonification.

A quartet regulates itself; its musicians cue, lead, follow, join and quit each other in a complex network of connectivity. These networks are practiced until they become subtle to the point of near-invisibility, yet comprise the underlying social/physical engine that ultimately orders and shapes their sounds to form the collective structures of music.

The Space Between, externalizes and explores this mechanism, making it, and the stage environment, strange again to the musicians who move, sense, and intersect within it. Bodies and instruments can organize, conjuring alignment and unity, but also might tangle or stall. The musical and physical exist in explicit dynamic interdependency, each changed by and changing the tensions, balances, and boundaries of the other.

The Space Between is not a narrative, but rather a study of social dynamics – these human drives that are so effectively realized through physical performance: need, intimacy, playful exploration, a desire to belong and the collective pressures to conform. The musicians wrap their arms around one another to create complex harmonics not possible with only two hands, they will move in mechanical unison through rhythmic scratch-tone passages, and they will mute one another’s instruments to manipulate or stop specific sounds.

The Space Between is the culmination of a two-year collaboration between the multifaceted Chicago-based Spektral Quartet, director and designer Mark DeChiazza, and composer/sound artist Lisa Renée Coons. DeChiazza specializes in large-scale musical works, and Coons has done numerous spatial and movement-based sound works, including commissions for the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and the American Composer’s Orchestra. The world premiere was in January 2020 at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, and it performed in February 2020 at the Robert Mondavi Center in Davis, California.

DeChiazza’s set: a set of large translucent rubber panels and bars of light that hover above the stage, tensioned on rubber tubes. Continuously reconfigured by the performers—the panels stretch taut between exposed lighting booms or are released into collapsed heaps on the floor.