Disintegration

As part of The Next Four Years at Prague Quadrennial 2023.

Disintegration is an irreversible performance for solo cello that interrogates hierarchy through brute force. The score demands the physical destruction of the instrument, thereby creating the conditions in which the work can only be achieved after the cellist commits to its performance. Upon breaking through the score’s inherent tipping point, the means necessary to complete the piece are discovered live. Consequently, both score and composer become superfluous as the performer takes ownership of the music, liberating themselves from the score as they wrestle it out of a theoretical framework and forge it into reality by manipulating the instrument to destruction.

The Next Four Years is a speculative retrospective of Irish performance design and scenography in the years 2023-2027, challenging the designers of today to imagine the theatre of tomorrow. We have invited eight leading Irish designers, working across costume, lighting, music, props, set, sound and video, to collaborate with us on this project and investigate new approaches to design, in response to the PQ 2023 theme of RARE – which asks “what the world and theatre could look like in the post-pandemic future” and calls on designers to “imagine, visualise and even create rare visions of the future”.

Curated by Tom Creed

Performed by Caitríona Finnegan

Produced by Once Off Productions