“UTTERANCE”

For non-native speakers, utterance is a word that comes with a lot of confusing pronunciations, meanings and usages. This piece is an homage to a friend of mine who spent a long evening conversation explaining to me (and others) what is the meaning of the word Utterance and when it is a appropriate to use it. Is it pronunciation? Is it mention? Is it expression? Is it a style of communication? Is it all of them? Since Frank Wörner comes from Germany and I will soon move to Switzerland I decided to use German and English to convey distance from the absolute understanding of the word Utterance.

The piece is an absurd dialogue between the singer and a second character who is “inside” a single speaker and that will be interrupting and explaining the meaning of Utterance to Frank. The learning experience makes use of singing, speaking, laughing, shouting and what the performer feels at the moment of listening to what the speaker has to say. It has a controlled level of improvisation, making the piece be halfway into a small music theater monologue-dialogue between him and his many selves. An absurdist fiction that was not that far away from that original conversation among friends on the topic of Utterance.