DOMENICO DE CLARIO performance 'Cathedral': 15 November 2009, NGV Australia

Domenico de Clario performance. Photo: Julie Clarke, 2009

I was honored to be part of the audience at Domenico de Clario’s “Cathedral” performance at NGV Australia yesterday afternoon. The performance was introduced and participants were instructed to read the text 'cathedral' on the wall and decide whether they wanted to enter the cathedral. A leaflet was handed out with instructions by the performer, his final sentence was: "thank you in advance for your kind attendance and participation in 'cathedral'; the hope is that whatever you have desired to be released will, after speaking it, drift high in the sky above Melbourne, destined to move on for ever as inaudible sound".

As the blindfolded de Clario played a keyboard in the rather small space of his Volkswagen, members of the audience were invited to enter the cathedral (a large confessional unit on the back of a trailer behind the VW, complete with chair, two vertical blue fluorescent lights and a vase of flowers) and speak their thoughts, which would only be heard by de Clario through earphones that he was wearing.
There was a wonderful proximity and distance enabled in this performance, because although de Cario’s body and that of the person inside the cathedral were in different physically demarcated spaces, the affect of the person’s voice on the performer’s music and in turn on the emotions of those watching and listening to de Clario play was discernibly noticeable. The music definately changed when there was a person inside the confessional.

When I entered the rather claustrophobic space, I could only think of what others might have said and then could think of very little except to articulate my feelings in the hot and black space, and this in turn caused a ripple in the music that Domenico performed. I could hear his music change and understood the affect that any person’s voice would have had upon his performance. I lasted only a few minutes and had to rush out to get air. What I really enjoyed about this performance, apart from the aesthetics and often melancholic music (very much like his Triestement), was that there was this beautiful feed-back loop between the body of the performer and the body of strangers and most, if all of this affect was unseen.