Dialog is the first part of a triptych inspired by Collapse, a poem by the American poet Claudia Rankine. This intimate and fragmentary text forms the poetic and emotional starting point of the work. It evokes an inner collapse, a tension between what resists and what falls apart, between the awareness of the body and the possibility of rebirth.

The piece is also shaped by the powerful visual world of Francis Bacon, whose distorted figures, suspended between flesh, violence, and solitude, have nourished the sonic imagination of the work. As in Bacon’s paintings, Dialog seeks to reveal a fragile, unstable human presence, at times almost dissolved, caught in a space where the contours of the body and identity begin to waver.

At the centre of the piece lies an inner dialogue: that of a figure with its shadow. The countertenor embodies this dialogue vocally, acting at once as character, memory, and double of himself. His voice unfolds in a stream of consciousness in which breath, timbre, inflection, and physical tension become the true materials of the musical discourse. The voice does not merely narrate: it experiences, cracks, and resists.

Through the emotional states suggested by the text — collapse, resistance, and inner transformation — the music explores a territory between illusion and reality. The instruments extend, displace, and transform the vocal material, as though each sound were the echo of an inner perception or a sensory memory.

Dialog invites the listener into an intimate, unstable, and sensitive space-time, where music becomes the site of a confrontation with the self: a dialogue between presence and disappearance, between vulnerability and strength, between what collapses and what, despite everything, continues to seek a form of life.

Collapse

The collapse is within the life within.

There remains no real antidote

to the collapse except to collapse

without coming apart while coming apart.

The heart aches. Before another step,

absorb the texture of whatever is touched

when one touches down. The heart breaks.

Break up the muted call with its fractured o,

texture of whatever is touched

when one touches down. It’s never just

the hard familiar hit of ground.

There’s texture in whatever is touched

when one touches down. Resist

the frantic desire to undo our moment.

Resist the fear of one’s weight falling

into the texture of whatever is touched

when one touches down, even if

the whatever is whomever is touched,

all our selves broken apart,

all our vowels lost to consonants,

the r’s raging war, rousing the quiet

sinking a body’s want to rise up. Rise up.

Claudia Rankine