Polyphonic Songs, Day 2: Genevieve Murphy, Keren Levi | NeverLike, Nicole Beutler

PROGRAMME

Day 2: Thursday 29 November 2018, from 19:30

— The one I feed by Genevieve Murphy

— Departing Landscapes by Keren Levi | NeverLike

— 1: SONGS by Nicole Beutler (NBprojects)

1: SONGS by Nicole Beutler (NBprojects)

1: SONGS, Nicole Beutler’s award winning performance from 2009, is a solo performance presented as a concert, a Liederkreis, an existential exercise for a singing body. Performer Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti surrenders her voice to the intense words of tragic female figures from the history of theatre, figures such as Antigone, Medea and Gretchen. The suffering of the fictional heroines (and anti-heroines) repeatedly enters her very being as she sings, shouts and speaks – she is fragile, raw, calculating and emotional. But who is speaking here? And do the dramatic references from the past resonate in the here and now? The symbiosis of contemporary electronic music composed by Gary Shepherd and texts from the literary canon forms the basis for a subtle but loud scream against the instability and the incalculable incalculability of our existence. Director and choreographer Nicole Beutler works with the tension between intense emotionality and cool calculation on the one hand and with the reflection on the history of theatre on the other hand. How do we look at emotions, what moves us and what doesn’t? And in how far does the past resonate through to the contemporary reality?

Departing Landscpaes by Keren Levi | NeverLike

“The attack of a sound is not its character… Decay, however, this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing — leaving us rather than coming towards us. “ – Morton Feldman

Feldman’s Triadic Memories (1981), a solo piano piece, invokes that “other place that’s not a metaphor for something else.” The composer described it as “probably the largest butterfly in captivity, concerned with the shape of a leaf and not the tree”.

In this self-contained space of memory and detail, Keren Levi continues her one-sided conversation with Feldman’s music in a solo performance – her first since The Bottom Line in 2003.

Following on from her performance-essay Footnotes for Crippled Symmetry – an interweaving of movement, sound, text, video and sculpture in response to Feldman’s Crippled Symmetry (1983) – Levi narrows down her choreographic scope to the movement of her own body, limited in space and fields of mobility. Into this personal inquiry, Levi has invited long-term collaborators and friends, dramaturg Igor Dobričić, composer Tom Parkinson and audiovisual artist Assi Weitz to join her quiet mediation on decay, time, sound and memory. 

Upon Levi’s request, artist Noa Giniger created a watercolor drawing out of the title of piece. This artwork is in line with Giniger’s ongoing project SPELLS, a text writing system which she developed based on the structure of stencil lettering.

The one I feed by Genevieve Murphy

With full commitment, the Scottish/Dutch composer Genevieve Murphy (1988) surrenders to a new adventure with accordion players Renée Bekkers and Pieternel Berkers, from the praised duo TOEAC. In their performance ‘The One I Feed’ – a composition assignment from November Music – Murphy explores the crossing roads between performance art and contemporary music. A fascination for psychology and the human behind the musician always guides the work of Murphy. ‘The One I Feed’ sketches a portrait of the conflict and insecurity in a destructive mind. Murphy pays attention to the conflict between the power of attraction and repulsive effect that the behavior of these people causes. The result is an intriguing process that is both audible and bisible for the entire audience.