Making Form

It’s helpful to think of a dramaturgy inhabiting each of three Borges writings in turn. These three states are in a spectral relationship to each other: from the formless, chaotic state emerges action, pattern and line; as this scenario heats up and starts to ‘cook’ residual energies, colours and momentum emerge. Each state creates the justification for the next. In relation to creating opera, Birtwistle talks about ‘earning the right to sing’ – of creating the justification for singing to emerge out of the particular formal conditions one creates.

By separating these performance states into scena derived from the Borges texts we can address each ‘state of being’ in turn and focus the strategies for shaping them.