Solace

Presentation

Solace — music theatre for solo soprano and film

In a world that maps, measures and predicts almost everything, the unknown has nearly vanished from a life. What has quietly gone with it is the faculty for facing it — the capacity to sit with what cannot be answered. Into this world Aisling has built Solace Stasis, a service for people who have come to a standstill. Inside a vast hangar she constructs, for each client, a scene built around the very thing they cannot face, and a live actor meets them there so they can rehearse the one thing daily life no longer asks of them: to face something unpredictable and stay in it.

Erin is that actor, the work's only live presence, played by the soprano on stage; Aisling appears only in film. Between the two women runs an unspoken argument about technology, and how much of our lives we should hand to it. Aisling trusts the tools and organises them to serve us; Erin believes that whatever a tool does for us, we slowly unlearn. The service holds that contradiction at its core — designed from total knowledge of each client, yet delivered as genuine encounter.

Four clients pass through: a daughter losing her father to Alzheimer's; a photographer who can no longer press the shutter; a man who has handed his feelings to his metrics; a woman whose careful sacrifices for the climate stopped adding up to anything. Some are restored. For others the session quietly becomes the life. In a corner of the hangar sits one set Aisling never briefed anyone on, running for years. Erin carries her own unframed unknown, the very thing the service was built to make bearable.

Solace invites us to rediscover, confront and embrace uncertainty in a world dominated by data and facts.