Score, synthesizer diskettes and parts for hire

As its title implies, this work is based on an exploration of a duality. On the one side there is Europe, with its fascination with darkness, melancholy and madness. I read Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic study of Gérard de Nerval’s El Desdichado in her book on melancholy, Soleil Noir, with its penetrating insights into Nerval’s insanity, melancholy and suicide. On the other side there is India with its radiance, its naivety (there was no Indian Freud), its nostalgia for the divine presence and its mysteriously inviting profundity. (Chitra is a female character from the Mahabharata about whom Tagore wrote an enchanting play). Heaviness/lightness, power/delicacy, slow/fast, statement/dance: these are some of the contrasts whose juxtaposition I explore as two aspects of one consciousness.