The Sight of Music
Sylvia Solakidi*
Vexations by Eric Satie, durational performance (13 hours) by pianist Igor Levit (born 1987), staged by artist Marina Abramović (born 1946), set design by David Amar, lighting by Urs Schönebaum, performers Jia-Yu Chang Corti and Sara Maurizi. Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London, April 24, 2025.
A soundless “shhhhh” opens my eyelids. Igor Levit’s finger shifts from the black key to his rounded lips; silence until he returns.
How long has he been playing? “Don’t’ look at your watch,” said Marina Abramović during her introductory conversation with Mark Ball, the artistic director of the Southbank Centre. The height of the music score pile on the piano measures time; piles of paper sheets are moved to the music stand, those already played are on the floor.
840 pages in total: the repetitions of the single-page score of Vexations that composer Eric Satie instructed in 1893. Igor’s feet brush pages aside, as he returns to his chair. Not a piano stool; this one has a back and armrests. Igor’s legs measure time; they rest on the armrests, they are crossed, stretched out, without shoes; he stands, he leans against the piano, he presses his forehead against the music stand; he drinks water, he eats, he uses tissues. Igor’s right arm measures time: it draws circles in the air, it covers his face. Concentration? Fatigue? His body plays silent music. Igor’s hands measure time; they explore the black and white keys, notes played one by one, fast and smooth, slow and loud; now he sings them, bass played with either hand. Listen, this note is different. Mistake? Not in this performance; variation, rather. Igor’s hands throw piles to the floor with a thud, let single pages flutter through the air, Igor’s feet tap the floor. Noise? Not in this performance; rather the beat of living with this piece. Boosts of energy and calm retreats, the shifting tempo of the map of Vexations-land.
A muffled, rubbing sound. From the charcoal platform where the piano stands, a cube with an attached rectangular part is dragged across the white square grid, the stage floor. Another one. And more cubes, and slanted boxes, several cubes long. Mind the gaps!
The first detached fragments become chairs on either side of the platform; I know these chairs: they are like transitory objects not meant for contemplation, which I experienced in Abramović’s 2023 retrospective in the Royal Academy of Arts. The platform, this three-dimensional puzzle, was created by David Amar, a composer of objects, who has collaborated with Abramović in transitory objects for her 2024 exhibition in the Modern Art Museum in Shanghai.
Two female performers dressed in black and white create the gorges under Igor’s music; I know them, they reperformed Abramović’s works in the Royal Academy. They move very slowly; I know this movement, it is a vital element of the Abramović method.
What moves them?
Igor, enclosed in his chair, distances his body from the piano without his hands losing contact with it; Igor and piano are one single body, they are confined but their music is not, they run the marathon of the 840 pages and their sound body explodes, its movement moves the space, it is taken up by the performers, who free the sight of their music as they gradually detach elements from their platform, from their own body. Look at them now, they resemble Umberto Boccioni’s futurist sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, they are defenceless as their exploded body plays over chasms, and their music… “Free your mind,” Abramović had advised in her welcome announcement before the spectators took their seats. So, this is what she meant: to take up their movement, which starts from hands on black-and-white keys. To become vexations of space and time, free like them, defenceless like them.
“I hold you for a while and then I go”.
“Trust your memory,” I heard during the introductory conversation. A memory: the performance 512 hours, Serpentine Gallery, London, June 2014. The fingers of Marina’s right hand interlocked with mine; her left hand touching my back as she leads me to stand in the passage between the central and one flanking space, with eyes closed, to “feel the sounds of the school playground”; her whisper in my ear.
Do the two performers whisper as their hands invite the hands of spectators, and touch their arms or shoulders as they lead them to sit on the detached elements of the platform with their eyes closed? They are now being seen by us, who still sit in the stalls, who are the next to take their place; they become as defenceless as Igor, as the performers who move their hands from one spectator to the other. First two, later four, gradually seven on-stage spectators, changing every twenty minutes. Igor does not open up towards space, but towards people; he invites. The dispersed parts of his sound body are adopted by spectators, who sit by him, guard and support him. I am in 512 hours again! Because 512 hours is not a performance, they are hands that create a moment of connection; Igor’s hands this time. And we all support these hands, we support our transient community, Marina included, when she is brought on stage close to the end of the performance. Leaving for a ten-minute comfort break feels unnecessary; why should I break this bond? But when Igor returns from his break, the community he has created guards this defenceless bond in silence and welcomes him; and me.
So, this is what Marina meant when she said during the introductory conversation that two performers will help Igor. It is not just because they bring him water and food, but because they help his hands reach the audience. So, this is the reason why the piece is played 840 times. And when Satie noted “very slowly,” he did not mean that Igor should play very slowly, but that the event should unfold very slowly. This is the “powerful, transformative energy of duration” that Marina stressed during the introductory conversation. Performers and on-stage spectators unite stage and stalls through a grid of hands and gazes. Look at them, they are mirrored up there! I know this angled mirror over the stage; I first saw it in the 2013 performance of Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, in the Opera of Paris, where Marina had used it to create a cosmic space with floating movement.
This time, it nails the image down to earth, it mirrors the white square grid where the performers attach the detached charcoal grey platform elements, the black-and-white cubic keys of the spatial piano; the visual map of the sound of Vexations-land. Not just black and white; the cubes are stools and backed and flat benches, where people in multicoloured clothes sit; twenty-three of them at the end.
The dynamic space of the stage looks like Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie. Igor and Marina’s jazz communal event after Satie.
“We don’t know how it is going to be,” Marina said during the introductory conversation at 10:00 am. And what if spectators had not given their hands to the performers? And what if Igor had been unable to play with the very slow movement unfolding around him? The event was constantly on the edge, but never fell into the chasms of the platform.
It is now 11:00 pm. Igor holds the last page and looks at it, as if for the first time, before he lets it fly. He plays one by one the notes from the beginning. I listen to the 841st repetition as the first refrain of the encounter that is about to be concluded and transformed in memory. Igor stops before the end. He hits the armrests with his hands. He stands up. He heads towards Marina. “My friend and collaborator,” she called him in her welcome announcement. This event is like a friendship. Classical music and performance art accept each other’s beauty and weakness and allow themselves mutual transformation. They invite the audience to nurture a budding hybrid.
*Sylvia Solakidi is a PhD researcher at the University of Surrey, UK. She also holds a BSc in Biology. She has published essays in peer reviewed academic journals about experiences of time that discuss theatre and music performances, visual art and literature alongside the writings of phenomenologists, anthropologists and performance scholars. https://surrey.academia.edu/SylviaSolakidi.
Copyright © 2025 Sylvia Solakidi
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #31, June 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
