dozens of canons: Anaïs Faivre Haumonté

Program Note

Georges Seurat, Anaïs Faivre Haumonté sur son lit de mort (1887):

A silent, intimate scene, poorly lit, with key details – … the face, the (presumably) interlaced fingers, the crucifix … — hard to discern, lost to a deliberate technique and its limited means: a small drawing not meant to reveal itself to passing spectators.

There are, in fact, dozens of canons here, some of them expansive, many quite tiny, all of them compressed to a private hovering within inches of the performer’s body and her instrument: sieved through a formal progression that refuses to support them, and refuses to settle into a forward motion, but rather offers a series of suspended tableaux: each filled with tiny, indiscernible motions, balances, weights, gaps, attractions and repulsions. Maybe a series of epilogues.