“Elasticity of Time” was a collaborative event and performative poem based on audience participation. We sought for our audience members to explore and experience the elasticity of subjective temporality while reciting a series of textual materials on musical time.

Appropriating texts from Joji Yuasa’s essay “Temporality and I: From the Composer’s Workshop” (Perspective of New Music, Vol. 31, No.2 [Summer 1993]) and a series of his interviews with Akira Nishimura from Michōno uchū«, sakkyoku no bōken (Unheard Space, Adventures in Composition, Shunjusha Publishing, 2008), the performance directed audience members to recite short fragments of the aforementioned textual materials upon taking a certain number of “deep breaths” as instructed on a strip of paper. Although the number of breaths varied according to specific instructions that an audience member received before the performance, we included two to three duplicated instructions for different audience members. This was to see if they would feel a sense of temporality, based on their breaths, that was individually variable, personal, and non-linear. Even if audience members “counted” before their recitations to resemble a monochromatic temporal frame, it was still unpredictable, as the act of counting was in a “beatless” context and based on their individual breaths. The resulting performance drifted from vertical synchronization between audience-performers. Our intent was for our audience members to grasp time with the “uncountable continuity of breathing […] discretely arranged in recognition of the ki (spirare in Latin) […] each in its own subjective time,” as theorized by Yuasa.