Executive Exxhaustion engages improvisation and freehand movement across the piano as a whole, inviting sound to surface in ways that are intimate, unruly, and suggestively off-balance. Inspired by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s reflections on exhaustion and its political charge, Leila Bencharnia’s performance approaches exasperation, exile, and dysfunction as subtle modes of resistance against the forms of systemic exploitation underpinning rising fascist politics.

The piano becomes a drifting terrain: harmonies veer from the expected, rhythms fray or flare, and notes lean into each other with restless tenderness. Through this unstable musical grammar, Bencharnia’s work reveals how disruption can form its own coherence, how fragility can be generative, and how moments of sonic failure can invoke the unexpected.

Exasperation tugs at phrases and stretches breath; exile echoes in motifs that appear and dissolve; dysfunction becomes a refusal of linearity or clarity. These deviations invite a different way of listening—to follow the music as it slips through cracks rather than along familiar lines.