TIMESTAMP
Karen Cecilia and Emilee Lord
In this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the show Timestamp, from creators and performers Karen Cecilia and Emilee Lord, offers a quietly powerful meditation on the moments that shape our lives. Presented as a performance duet, the piece is both deeply personal and broadly resonant, capturing the universal while honouring the intimate.
Cecilia’s spoken-word monologue forms the emotional spine of the piece. Delivered with measured intensity and aching vulnerability, her words chart the burdens of expectation, particularly those borne by women across generations and social strata. Her storytelling is poetic and grounded, drawing the audience in with an emotional honesty that never feels overwrought.
In tandem, Lord’s movement work provides a visceral counterpoint. She engages in a hypnotic, live dialogue with a theremin simultaneously played by Karen Cecilia, as her choreography shifts between fluidity and precision, responding to the instrument’s haunting tones with a sensitivity that borders on the alchemical. Her interaction with sound becomes more than accompaniment; it is an embodiment of the unspoken, the suppressed, the remembered.
Cecilia, an expert thereminist, commands the instrument with remarkable finesse, composing soundscapes in real-time that seem to breathe alongside Lord’s movement. Her mastery of the theremin, a notoriously difficult instrument, adds a layer of virtuosity to the performance, as if she’s pulling emotional threads from the air itself. The result is a sonic and physical duet that feels both spontaneous and deeply attuned.
Together, Cecilia and Lord create a space of mutual witnessing—each performance element holding space for the other. The result is absorbing, even haunting: a reminder that the quietest performances often leave the deepest impact. Themes of control, surrender, identity, and legacy shimmer throughout, unspoken yet profoundly felt.
Timestamp succeeds as both an artistic and emotional experience. It is performance as reclamation, of narrative, of agency, of time itself. Dignified and unflinching, the show resonates long after its final breath, reminding us that while individual stories may differ, the forces shaping them remain eerily consistent.
A standout at this year’s Fringe, Timestamp is a moving and necessary piece—subtle in its delivery but fearless in its truth. If you get the chance, this is a must see performance making use of a very unique instrument and spectacular storytelling.
You can follow Karen Cecilia here for more news of her shows.
