Nora Fischer

The Leap

To get right to the point: we may be in a concert hall here, but the Singer Nora Fischer is not here today. Instead of singing, Person Nora is going to tell us why she is not going to sing. For a while, in fact, she couldn't, due to a complex cramping that held her larynx in such a grip that even Happy Birthday to her best friends couldn't come out. How could such a thing happen?

With that question, Nora digs her way around, through the stifling pressures of the world's biggest stages, to the inner pressures she had to pull out of her system as a vicious sting to coax her throat muscles back into relaxation. She exposes how her body sabotaged further participation in a world of superlatives, top performances and glittering successes. How she never quite fit the mold that the music industry, consciously or unconsciously, has ready for great talents. How she gradually lost the pleasure with which singing once began, and how that pleasure gave way to a dark inner world full of piercing eyes and sharp judgments. In the deafening absence of her instrument, Nora searches diligently for an explanation of how something born of so much pleasure can become a source of so much severity.

Even though this is a performance without live music; Nora Fischer deliberately chose not to go into theaters, but rather to tell her story in the concert halls and music festivals where she has sung so often. To also be able to share with the audience how wry it feels not to be able to fill these halls with melodies. And because it feels like the safest place for her to be able to share her extremely personal story with her audience. The Leap is an invitation to join Nora in an intimate revelation of what we all quietly know: nothing is what it seems. (Photo below Merlijn Doomernik)