Part II is a live dance theater performance with master improviser and former William Forsythe/Ballett Frankfurt dancer Michael Schumacher. During the fifty minute work, the spectators experience a person undergoing the traumatic transformation of the body in the period between death and rebirth. At first, the spectators witness an almost immobile Schumacher sitting at a table, condemned to execute a series of futile, minute tasks. Violent physical spasms and vocal outbursts interrupt this stasis, overtaking the performer's body.

During this period, the room's behavior appears to be unrelated to the dancer's presence. Wireless photoelectric sensors distributed throughout the performance space measure the changes of light in the environment. Additionally, Schumacher himself wears several acceleration sensors which also gauge sudden changes of speed or tempo in his movement. The space thus makes its presence felt to the spectators through continuously fluctuating and repeating patterns of light and sound influenced by the sensing.

The room that Schumacher inhabits is itself a character, shifting from light to darkness for no apparent reason while the sound intensity builds up only to suddenly disappear again. The room moves through a series of states that convey feelings of nervousness, restlessss, meditation and anger. Gradually, however, the performance builds in choreographic and visual/sonic intensity as Schumacher's body begins to transform, the room's behavior becoming ever more coupled to his increasingly expressive, almost possessed movement. Finally, the earlier stasis of the performance gives way to fluid, ecstatic dance as Schumacher is released from his previous body, entering a new one.

The work is inspired by the late plays of Samuel Beckett, the minimalist austerity and contemplation inherent in the works of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko as well as the stories of before and after death experience described in the Tibetan Book of The Dead. Schwelle, Part II explores the in-between states experienced in daily life, from the edges of seeing and hearing, the moments between sleep and consciousness and the fragile border between life and death. Where does the body end and the room begin? What happens in the threshold where body and room merge, mutually influencing and transforming each other?

Part I is a thirty-six minute audio/visual performance exploring the experience undergone at the threshold of the dissolution of the body and consciousness. Shot in High Definition video, the work is front projected onto a single screen and consists of three overlapped and synchronized projections that form a panoramic image with up to 8 channels of surround sound.

Over the course of the performance, the spectators are taken on a powerful journey through changing landscapes of fleeting images and sound. A sweeping light from the darkness that suddenly illuminates the space, everyday images of people emerging from a subway station in a snowstorm and a barren snowscape give a sense of the invisible and uncontrollable forces lurking behind everyday experience.

As the image landscape becomes increasingly abstract with Rothko like colors and dense walls of sound, Part 1 builds toward peak intensity, transporting the viewer through the threshold stages of dying and dissolution.

Schwelle I is inspired by the tibetan Buddhist concept of the bardo, the in between state between death and rebirth, or the exhalation and inhalation of breath.

Four participants enter into a small, closed off, pitch black dark room. The room houses a large architectural construction: 4, 1 x 6 meter long tunnels outfitted with a series of taught, fabric muslin screens. The rear screen is solid while the others feature progressively larger rectangular openings. Housed above the rear of the tunnels are cylindrical reflectors, each outfitted with 3 small but high powered super bright blue LED’s. The cylinders can be adjusted so that the back screens are indirectly lit from the LED’s. In the audio setup, a parabolic speaker/reflector is positioned at the rear of each tunnel. These serve the purpose of directing a columnated beam of sound directly through the tunnels. Additionally, a quadraphonic speaker setup and a subwoofer which can handle frequencies below 20Hz is positioned in the corners of the space and facing the walls so as to remove any perception of direct loudspeaker sources for the visitor.

A commercial CO2 sensor, which measures the fluctuations of CO2 in the room from the participant’s aggregate breath, is situated above the tunnel structure. Small changes of CO2 yield relatively static effects in their influence on the speed of change of lighting and sound intensity. Large changes of CO2 yield more pronounced results. These include raising and lowering the amplitude of the infrasonic audio signals (in the form of pulsed sine waves) continuously above and below the threshold of hearing, increasing the complexity of the audio mix, adding in higher, barely perceivable frequencies over 13Khz and finally, rapidly changing the speed of intensity of the LED’s. Such brighnesss changes yield oscillations or pulsing of the light, thus effectively making the tunnel architecture and the screens rapidly appear and disappear.

The experience lasts a duration of 15 minutes. The visitors are brought individually into the pitch black environment and shown their places on the floor by an attendant with a small flashlight. The visitors are told nothing about the technical system in the room; only to keep mindful of their breathing. Once all of the participants have entered, the room sits in total darkness for a period of 3 minutes. Gradually, a clock in the software increases the LED brightness level from 0-40% over the course of 8 minutes. Simultaneously, the system begins to poll the level of CO2 in the room every minute and, based on a look up table of values, begins to adjust the various audio parameters. After 8 minutes, the CO2 measurements begin to affect the lighting parameters as well. Sound, barely audible at the threshold of hearing, begins to fill the space from loudspeakers positioned in the distance, its amplitude, frequency and timbre almost imperceptibly altered by the minute changes and gradual fluctuations of carbon dioxide in the room’s atmosphere and the individual breathing of the participants.

Over the course of the 15 minutes, the barely perceivable lit surfaces slowly appear in the far distance. The changing intensity of the light’s color temperature makes these surfaces appear to be simultaneously flat and deep. The room, made apparent through the imperceptible changes of light and sound, appears to expand and contract, locked in a dynamic coupling with the participants’ own breathing patterns. Through a careful choreography of light and sound, the room moves in and out of the visitor’s threshold of perception with space functioning as a screen and canvas for their own mental projections and hallucinations.