For the last few months, I have been working with the composer...

For the last few months, I have been working with the composer and performer Anne La Berge, developing the text for her new piece Assail. The subject of Assail is sexual assault and the difficulties we meet when we try to talk about it. From the very start of our research, it became apparent that there was no agreement on what constitutes an assault, or what exactly a rape is, over and above the physical facts of it. The voices of the victims / survivors are seldom heard clearly, the motivations of the perpetrators baffle us: is rape about sex or about power, and if the latter, why does it take this sexualised form? As we catalogued academic research and personal stories, incluing our own experiences of having been assaulted, we came to understand that these incidents are both varied and one, are experienced differently but share commonality. As the piece began to take form, Anne wrote a narrative of a sexual assault, which I rewrote in six different emotional registers: fear, shame, sorrow, confusion, disgust and rage. At the first rehearsal last week I watched and listened as each register was interpreted by Anne’s ensemble MAZE (pictured above) using guided musical improvisation, augmented by prerecorded sounds and images sporadically displayed on iPads. Through this organised chaos, Anne’s lone female voice relays fragments of the story / stories we created, the missing words speaking as loud as those we hear, telling of the impossibility of a complete narrative, of total understanding. Assail will premiere at the Bimhuis, Amsterdam on June 2nd at 8.30pm, with a touring version to follow. We hope also to create an interactive online version.