And My Heart Almost Stood Still

An interrupted solo inspired by Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and a letter by Hellen Keller

by Ari Teperberg

In And My Heart Almost Stood Still, Ari takes the viewers on a journey into his own world of nonverbal, sensual communication where even the subtlest of sensations can become full of joy, pain or beauty. The trigger for this creation process was a letter sent by the famous deaf-blind author and intellectual Helen Keller to the New-York Symphony Orchestra in 1924, in which she describes how she “listened” to their performance of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, simply by touching the radio’s membrane and feeling the vibrations. The piece wishes to generate a space of heightened sensation, in which an alchemy between the senses takes place. The text by Keller, as well as Beethoven’s haunting music, appears and disappears through different mediums and vibrates like a suppressed volcanic force, wishing to erupt. We are granted a close-up look into the body of the performer, who calibrates himself to hypersensitivity, seeking desperately for an alternative language through which to communicate. Inspired by Keller’s observations and by the connection she describes to the by-then deaf Beethoven, this piece too wishes to experience the power that music can have to communicate beyond boundaries, disabilities and loneliness.