ECLAT 2b

CIRCLES
Community between play and existential experience

 

Ricardo Eizirik: in steps
for five amplified voices and one performer (2018) ^WP

 

Alessandro Bosetti: »These Foolish Things«
for recorded voice and bass clarinet (2018) ^WP

 

Antje Vowinckel: Summit Meeting
fordialect voices and imitative singers (2018/19) ^WP

 

Huihui Cheng: Your Turn
A card game performance for six singers and spectators (2018) ^WP*

 

Hannes Seidl: For us. For us.
Songs on the piano for two to four voices (2018/19) ^WP**

 

Gabi Wüst (Schüttler/Genschel): Workshop of Love.
An audience survey with the Neue Vocalsolisten (2018) ^WP**

 

Alexander Schubert: A Perfect Circle
for bass clarinet and five voices(2018/19) ^WP**

 

Neue Vocalsolisten
Johanna Zimmer/Susanne Leitz-Lorey/Truike van der Poel/Martin Nagy/Guillermo Anzorena/Andreas Fischer

 

Gareth Davis, bass clarinet
Scene and space: Thomas Fiedler

 

* commissioned by Musik der Jahrhunderte
financed by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation

 

** Commissioned by Musik der Jahrhunderte
funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation

 

 

At a time when many young artists are turning away from high culture and virtuosity, leaving temples of the Muses, despising the artificial and questioning traditional forms of reception, when the visual gesture is equated with the musical, reality becomes artistic material and every performance is charged with media, the challenge for a top vocal ensemble and the role of its members also changes: they become a projection surface, a medium, representatives of reality.

 

For CIRLCES, seven very interdisciplinary and conceptually thinking composers* compose works independently of each other, in which questions about cultural heritage and communities of values, about rituals, about roles in communities and about social dynamics are expressed.

 

CIRCLES describes scenic positions in space, but at the same time social circles addressed in the concert, semi-staged, discursive, participatory, and immersive projects–including a rediscovery of house music, a performance that emerges participatively from a conversation circle, and a fast-paced play characterized by spontaneity in which spectators can interfere, thwart, or counteract. Finally, a hypnosis session in which the audience is drawn deeper and deeper into a surreal world.

 

Between play and existential experience, the audience is offered different roles: Onlooker, idea giver, interactor, even proband of a hypnosis session–or always the pure observer role.