From dissolution to clarity. One voice. One journey. No body to clear.
Sentire di Prima | Songs from Before, is a cinematic work for voice conceived and performed by Vanessa Fernandez. Drawing on original cinematic soul, jazz, live cello, guitar and Butoh dance, it traces a single interior journey across twelve songs, from the stripping of identity to its quiet, hard-won reclamation.
The show does not tell a story. It traces a feeling. An intimate world built for sixty people, part concert, part performance art, part waking dream, where a Victorian armchair, a lamp that never goes out, and a portal draped in blue-black scrim hold a psychological landscape you enter rather than observe.
A work by Vanessa Fernandez
Featuring Xiou Xiou (cello), Yumi Umiumare (Butoh), Lucas Michailidis (guitar) Running time: approximately 45 minutes, no interval
Capacity: 60 seated
Venue: Temperance Hall, South Melbourne
Represented by Origin Music Publishing
Sentire, the Italian verb for hearing, touch, taste, smell and feeling simultaneously, names what this work asks of you. To experience before you understand. To arrive somewhere you recognise without knowing how you got there.
Extract
Act One. Song Four, Tell Me Who Are You.
A cold white light finds Vanessa in the armchair. From somewhere offstage, male vowel sounds arrive, disembodied, searching. She sings over them: let me see, let me see, let me see. As if in answer, something stirs at the sealed portal box upstage. Fingers appear first at the slit in the scrim. Then arms. Then a head, tilted at an angle that doesn't belong to waking life. Yumi Umiumare, one of Australia's most celebrated Butoh artists, unfolds herself through the opening like an insect shedding skin, learning gravity, learning form. She does not perform. She arrives. Cold blue-white light follows her as she crosses the stage. At the second chorus she approaches Vanessa, senses her, close enough to feel breath, then retreats. On the final lyric her light cuts to black. She runs off in darkness. The subconscious does not arrive announced. It breaks through.
Extract
Act Two. Song Six. Cracks in the Wall Reprise.
Lucas Michailidis enters from stage left already playing, no announcement, no ritual, mid-thought. He sits on the edge of the armchair, domestic and unhurried, guitar warm in the lamplight. The portal box is dark and sealed. From inside it, barely audible at first, Vanessa begins to hum, disembodied, fragile, like breath finding its way through walls. The melody is the same one she sang alone in full red light two scenes earlier, now wordless, now hidden, now sung to no one. Lucas plays. She hums from the dark. At a natural breath in the music his eyes drift once toward the box, just the eyes, head neutral, one second, then return to the guitar. It is the show's most tender moment.
