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Event: Sylvia Plath in the Domestic Sublime

The following event will take place on 5 December 2013 at 7:30 pm at the Helen Hills Hills Chapel at the esteemed Smith College. Please see the flyer below for all the great details on this Sylvia Plath related event.

BACH Goldberg Variations, BWV 988
SCHOENBERG Drei Klavierstücke, Op.11
and Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, Op.19

PLATH Kindness, Totem, Cut, Nick and the Candlestick, Mary’s Song, Child, Contusion, Words, and Balloons

Sylvia Plath in the Domestic Sublime celebrates the visionary voice and breathing spirit of Plath, 50 years after the poet’s death in 1963.

Like Plath’s late poems, Bach’s Goldberg Variations are at once intimate, personal, domestic; and macrocosmic, baring the deep architecture of the universe and the sufferings of the Platonic world-soul. With musically dynamic magic, the Goldberg Variations (inward as a dream, expansive as sunlight) transform the involutions of their close-hearkening dwelling-space within the human heart into a gothic cathedral reaching toward spiralling stars; while from the polyphonically woven body of the Goldberg, Plath’s words of domestic apocalypse bloom like stigmata; bleeding into the postapocalyptic beautiful world and abyss of Schoenberg’s Klavierstücke.

This performance is a creative outcome of Danaë Killian's postdoctoral research project at the University of Melbourne, Transformations and Initiations: Sylvia Plath in Flames, in Performance. In this research, Danaë Killian seeks like Plath to performatively cross flaming thresholds between biography and art, existence and death, potential and actual selves.


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