This new piece, currently in development, continues my current exploration of musical structures, materiality and how it can transform the body, as well as the use of sparse texts that are composed as lists/litanies.
Œ is a letter that denotes the contraction of an O and an E, and it is pronounced in different ways in different countries. It is also the transcription of the Odal or Othala rune; meaning heritage, inheritance, inherited estate.
The title, ECCE CORPUS HOM-Œ, is a play on Pontius Pilate’s ‘ecce homo/behold the man’, ‘ecce corpus/behold the body’; with a wink to the Catalan word for man ‘home’, and the English words home and homo. It has the subtitle of ‘a bodily fugue’ due of its musical structuring, and also as a silly and knowing fart joke.
It is therefore an invitation to behold the body, behold the man, behold the homo; and behold the body that is this homo man's home... The body is the garden of the soul! It is also an attempt to reclaim the ancient runic symbol of Odal/Othala away from the far right's grasp, re-appropriating it from a queer position and for a queer context.
The piece has as its musical score a selection of Spanish processional music compositions from Easter’s Holy Week, each one containing ‘ecce homo’ in their title. You can listen to the ECCE CORPUS HOM-Œ playlist here.
The piece is a poetic and associative investigation around questions of the body, body confidence, body image, body bags; political bodies, foreign bodies, queer bodies, disabled bodies; bodily scars, bodily fluids, bodily shame, bodily transcendence…
The piece involves the performer engaging with a series of materials, in task-based actions, resulting in the creation of striking images. For instance involving an artist’s brush with a long handle, honey, and gold leaf. The audience will be enlisted for the completions of these tasks.
Since the performer will remain silent throughout this piece, the text will be delivered by people invited from the audience. They will interrupt, punctuate and accompany the tasks/images with simple and short lists of word pairs with the word body. Therefore, this is not a piece of typical audience participation theatre, but rather a situation where the audience need to help Pablo make the show happen.