Part I is a turbulent, thirty-six minute audio/visual performance exploring the experience undergone at the threshold of the dissolution of the body and consciousness. Shot in High Definition video, the work is front projected onto a single screen and consists of three overlapped and synchronized projections that form a panoramic image with up to 8 channels of surround sound.

Over the course of the performance, the spectators are taken on a powerful journey through changing landscapes of fleeting images and sound. A sweeping light from the darkness that suddenly illuminates the space, everyday images of people emerging from a subway station in a snowstorm and a barren snowscape give a sense of the invisible and uncontrollable forces lurking behind everyday experience.

As the image landscape becomes increasingly abstract with Rothko like colors and dense walls of sound, Part 1 builds toward peak intensity, transporting the viewer through the threshold stages of dying and dissolution.

Part II is a live dance theater performance with master improviser andformer William Forsythe/Ballett Frankfurt dancer Michael Schumacher. During the fifty minute work, the spectators experience a person undergoing the traumatic transformation of the body in the period between death and rebirth. Set in a minimalist, Beckett like room, the dramatic structure of Part II unfolds, at first, in a slow and extremely concentrated manner.

Orchestrated by wireless sensors worn by the dancer as well as in the performance space, the room that Schumacher inhabits is itself a character. The space makes its presence felt to the spectators through continuously fluctuating and repeating patterns of light and sound influenced by the sensing.

At first, the spectators witness an almost immobile Schumacher sitting at a table, condemned to execute a series of futile, minute tasks. Sudden physical spasms and vocal outbursts interrupt this stasis, overtaking the performer's body, but only briefly, as he is continually forced to return to his work.

During this period, the room's behavior appears to be unrelated to the dancer's presence. The space shifts from light to darkness for no apparent reason and sound builds up only to suddenly disappear again as the room moves through a series of states that convey feelings of nervousness, restlessss, meditation and anger. Gradually, however, the performance builds in choreographic and visual/sonic intensity as Schumacher's body begins to transform, the room's behavior becoming ever more coupled to his increasingly expressive, almost possessed movement. Finally, the earlier stasis of the performance gives way to fluid, ecstatic dance as Schumacher is released from his previous body, entering a new one.

Schwelle, Part II employs cutting edge interactive technologies in order to explore the in-between states experienced in daily life, from the edges of seeing and hearing, the moments between sleep and consciousness and the fragile border between life and death. Where does the body end and the room begin? What happens in the threshold where body and room merge, mutually influencing and transforming each other?