Ellipsis

Ellipsis is a forty-minute performance directed by Fatih Gençkal and produced at Bomontiada Alt in Istanbul in 2017. I composed the music and designed the sound.

An ellipsis is three dots where words have been left out, and the piece was built around what its performers did not say: long stretches of movement without text, during which the sound carried the sentence. I wrote it as a series of suspended states — sustained electronic chords that never resolve, each one a dot — with the recorded voices of the performers appearing inside them, cut so that only the beginnings and ends of their phrases survived. The middle of every sentence was left to the room.

It was the piece in which I first used the performers’ own voices as the score’s material, something that became central to my later work.