Echoes in Pieces calls poetry—traditionally fixed in the normative form of print—back into the bodies of those who wrote it and reopens it outward through sound. By suspending a dominant understanding of language as transparent communication and stable signification, the performance approaches poetry as an embodied, acoustic practice in which critique unfolds through listening, resonance, and presence.

Our performance excavates aspects of language that are lost or forgotten in the process of one language being translated into another, within the journey that longs to arrive at precision, by leaning on what unfolds during the time of the performance itself. Within the specificity of poetry as a genre, what might the author’s voice—the “sound” of the original language—become when it reaches bodies that have lost access to the language’s meaning? What kinds of overlap, and what kinds of distance, arise between meaningless sound and the meaning and images of poetic language? Beyond meaning, beyond image, beyond discourse, beyond rhythm—what does poetry hold? What can it call forth? The performance may be a ritual act that gathers, from both inside and outside, those other elements that poetry has harbored—or perhaps never harbored at all.

In Berlin, where the times and voices of people with diverse mother tongues intersect, we seek to experiment with the mystery of chance and overlap through the experience of encountering poetry in the “between” of all times and all languages. The dimensions of language—as sign, as meaning, as sound, as vibration—and the kinetic qualities of our bodies that articulate this language overlap here among multiple identities. The soundscape formed by the performance, chance, silence, and noise will fold into, touch, and resonate with the layered strata of the city of Berlin, proposing a new way of experiencing poetry.