Not I

A woman of around 70 stands in the middle of the stage. She speaks in an unbroken stream of words, sentences and fragments. Individual events from her life can just be made out among this linguistic torrent: she imagines herself lying down with her face in the grass, she sees herself in the supermarket, or sitting on a hill in Ireland and repeatedly recalls her inability to speak, restrain the rush of words and thoughts and make herself understood. She is convinced that she is being punished by God, even though she cannot fathom the reason for this. She realises however that God does not need a reason to punish her. She is sure that she has something to say, but does not know what. If she only speaks for long enough, she will discover what it is she has to ask for forgiveness for. The curtain falls.
Beckett‘s works which was premiered in New York in 1972 is an essay in the loss of identity and the drifting apart of ‘I’ and ‘not I’. Heinz Holliger approaches this seemingly unstructured flow of words containing only four precisely placed pauses with a vocal line dismembered through complex rhythms and wide intervals and a medium of duplication: a tape produced by the composer superimposes a playback above the vocal line, displacing, curtailing and fragmenting what is sung and employing a mechanical mechanism to surmount the compulsive speech.