Chromatic Love Story

I. Tableau 1 – Quest for meaning (mosaic aesthetic) - Slow

A1 – Piano plays + soprano sings from Mad Girl’s Love Song (bars 5 to 10 - 30 seconds)

B1 – Soprano sings + piano player recites from Blue Bird by Bukowski (30 seconds)

C1 – both - abstract impro (graphic score)

D – pre-recorded electronics + abstract dance

A2 – Piano plays + soprano sings from Mad Girl’s Love Song (bars 19 to 24 - 30 seconds)

B2 – Soprano sings + piano player recites from Blue Bird by Bukowski (30 seconds)

C2 – both - abstract impro (graphic score)

II. Tableau 2 – Abstract painting scene (no music) – transition scene (from meaningless to
meaningful) – they paint each other from dark hues to warm hues (henceforth the
transformation)

III. Tableau 3 – Love declamation scene (based on love sonnets) - Fast

A1 – Piano plays + soprano sings (text from Love Poem in a Time of Climate Change-Sonnet XVII)

B1 – Soprano sings + piano player recites from Love Poem in a Time of Climate Change (Sonnet IV)

C1 – both – cut-up words impro (text score)

D – pre-recorded electronics + love dance

A2 – Piano plays + soprano sings (text from Love Poem in a Time of Climate Change-Sonnet XVII)

B2 – Soprano sings + piano player recites from Love Poem in a Time of Climate Change (Sonnet IV)

C2 – both - cut-up words impro (text score)

Tech requirements: 2 mics, 2 mic cables, 2 cameras, 2 mic stands, paint cans, brushes, floor cover, 2
canvases
 I. B1:

there’s a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I’m too clever, I only let him out

at night sometimes

when everybody’s asleep.

I say, I know that you’re there,

so don’t be

sad.

B2:

then I put him back,

but he’s singing a little

in there, I haven’t quite let him

die

and we sleep together like

that

with our

secret pact

and it’s nice enough to

make a man

weep, but I don’t

weep, do

you?
III. A1/A2:

I don’t love you as if you were rare earth metals, diamonds,

or reserves of crude oil that propagate war:

I love you as one loves most vulnerable things,

urgently, between the habitat and its loss.

I love you as the seed that doesn’t sprout but carries

the heritage of our roots, secured, within a vault,

and thanks to your love the organic taste that ripens

from the fruit lives sweetly on my tongue.

I love you without knowing how, or when, the world will end—

I love you naturally without pesticides or pills—

I love you like this because we won’t survive any other way,

except in this form in which humans and nature are kin,

so close that your emissions of carbon are mine,

so close that your sea rises with my heat.

B1:

I love you where waves shatter sea walls,

where pipelines burst into liquid fire,

where our only reservoir evaporates

into layers of salt and emergency.

I love you where radiant hurricanes

bloom acid rain from magnetic clouds,

breaking levees and flooding cities.

B2:

I love you where coastlines erode,

where habitat thresholds are crossed,

where rainforests turn to ash.

I love you where my passion unravels

your invisible ecologies and unleashes

the romance and hierarchy of survival,

our last and permanent address.