SHADOW –

When the Unseen Surfaces

Program Note

SHADOW is a performance-installation shaped by C. G. Jung’s analytical psychology, where the “shadow” is not a darkness to escape but an unseen part of the self waiting to be acknowledged. Rather than appearing as a fully formed figure, it lives at the edges—hidden, projected, distorted, and gradually revealed.

The performer remains behind a thin curtain, never directly visible. What the audience encounters instead are shifting silhouettes, mirrors that tremble gently overhead, and piano sounds that arrive in scattered fragments. Light, resonance, and broken reflections dissolve the boundaries of perception, creating a space where the familiar becomes uncertain—much like the psychological path from projection toward awareness.

The experience unfolds as a quiet progression:

a shadow first taking shape, then breaking apart, descending into its depths, and finally returning in a different, more integrated form.

Rebecca Saunders — Shadow (2006)

Saunders’ Shadow opens the space with a world of scraped strings, interior resonance, and gestures so fragile they feel more like afterimages than fully formed sounds. The music offers no identifiable figure—much like the shadow in Jungian psychology—appearing instead as distortion, fringe, and residue, a presence sensed only at its edges. Around the room, suspended mirrors sway gently and scatter unstable reflections, so that the audience perceives movement without source and hears sound without a visible body to produce it. In this unsettled environment, the piece quietly poses its first essential question: What am I perceiving, and what remains hidden from me?

Luciano Berio — 

Brin,  Leaf, Wasserklavier

(Six Encores, 1965–1990)

These three works form the program’s intermediate layer—the moment when fragments of identity begin to flicker into view, not yet solid but no longer absent. In Brin, tiny, luminous particles appear like brief fractures of thought, flashing into consciousness before slipping away again. Leaf extends this fragility: its trembling, weightless gestures evoke sensations that touch the surface of awareness only for an instant before dissolving into silence. Wasserklavier brings a different quality of reflection, its fluid lines rippling like a face glimpsed in moving water—recognizable yet impossible to grasp fully.

Taken together, these pieces trace the stage in which the shadow first acquires a tentative shape: still dispersed, still shifting, but already beginning to emerge from obscurity and move toward recognition.

Thomas Adès — Darkness Visible (1992)

Adès’ Darkness Visible marks the psychological descent—the moment when the shadow is no longer something distant but something the listener begins to meet. By deconstructing Dowland’s In darkness let me dwell, the piece leaves behind only spectral traces: overlapping lines that blur into one another, contours that vanish as soon as they appear, and a resonance that hovers like a presence sensed but not seen. The performer remains concealed behind the curtain, yet the listener begins to feel a figure emerging in the periphery, as if the shadow has shifted from an external projection to something recognized from within. In Jungian terms, this is the crossing of the threshold—the point where the unseen steps forward and asks to be acknowledged.

Luciano Berio —

Erdenklavier, Luftklavier, Feuerklavier

(Six Encores, 1965–1990)

The final three movements bring the cycle toward its ascent—an upward movement in which the shadow gradually becomes reintegrated into the self. In Erdenklavier, Berio grounds the listener in the density of earth, letting weight and resonance settle like a return to one’s foundations. From there, Luftklavier seems to lift the music off its axis, almost without gravity; what was once dark and opaque begins to feel light, porous, and filled with possibility rather than fear. This transformation prepares the way for Feuerklavier, where brief, concentrated bursts of sound appear like sparks—gestures not of destruction but of ignition, marking the moment when something formerly hidden reveals itself as a source of energy and drive.

Through this elemental progression—from earth to air to fire—Berio’s miniatures guide the listener along a subtle arc in which fragmentation slowly gathers coherence, and the shadow, once scattered and elusive, begins to take its place within a more integrated whole.

SHADOW is not a narrative but an encounter—

a space in which the audience meets the unseen aspects of themselves through sound, reflection, and distortion.

The performer’s body remains concealed, leaving only silhouettes, broken images, and the soft tremor of suspended mirrors. These fragments invite the listener to look past the empty stage and toward the shifting outlines of their own shadow, a presence that reveals itself not through form but through movement, resonance, and the instability of perception. In this setting, the shadow is not the opposite of light; it is the place where light first begins to speak.