The intense concentration with which Katalin La Favre begins this performance of percussion and spoken word is to continue throughout the show. Despite being alone on stage, flanked by her instruments and an orb of light, La Favre adopts multiple roles and personas in what is an intriguing exploration of the relationship between science and belief.
An adept percussionist, La Favre plays long passages of relatively experimental music on her marimba and xylophone. These comprise an overarching structure that takes us through time. We go from minimal, atonal sounds - the primordial ooze of music - to much more complex, multi-layered pieces at the end of the performance, when La Favre adds live melodies to previously recorded tracks. She has also created a sort of soundboard on stage, including a flowerpot, a cymbal dipped in water, a drum and a cow bell. She uses this to accompany some spoken word sections in a remarkable device in which she likens the very blunt, primal noises of the objects to the sounds of words and human communication.
La Favre does well to hold our attention through the show, especially in the instrumental sections which bear no discernible melodic line, or the interludes of interpretive movement which may well represent cosmic activity but it is unclear. I found some of the most engaging excerpts to be in the spoken word elements of La Favre’s performance. She describes the night before Galileo’s trial for heresy and the public responses to his claims. ‘Our poverty has no meaning,’ she paraphrases in explaining how people felt betrayed by science taking the place of an omniscient God. That statement resonated in my mind long after the marimba and xylophone had rung out to the last.
Whilst this one woman show displays mammoth effort and skill, alongside a striking take on a longstanding social and moral conflict, I more often found myself trying to decipher La Favre’s interpretations than the thoughts they were provoking. ‘There is no certainty, just those who are certain,’ La Favre tells us. Her guess is as good as mine.
