If dance was the pretext, the preface of inscriptions-traces, grammatically possessed, a potential to signify “nothing, in particular”? Death by Landscape, a concert is a hosting of works by artists Han-Gyeol Lie & Paul Kotal, costume designer An Breugelmans, film maker Ujjwal Kanishka Utkarsh, visual artist Cécile Tonizzo, light designer Yasemin Duru, and dance artists Hugo Le Brigand & Alix Eynaudi. Juxtaposing their works in the undergrowth of a dark theater room, together they co-produce an atmosphere, an atmosphere that allows things not to snap into making sense.
Death by Landscape, a concert oscillates between a second night’s encounter, an hommage to Janet, a cadence out of time, une balade dans le bois, a melody sung in darkness, a sting removed by fiction, a waste of time, an act of archeography, a thank-you-dance, a dance to under-grow. Falling through the fields, thanks and at the cost of semantic fields, fields of vision, fields of studies, wheat fields, oil fields, magnetic field, agricultural field, agricultural field laborers, battlefield. Death by Landscape leaves an iridescent trail of mourning lotion in the room that opens gaps in the sound, inserts air and dances there: I want to publish words in your knee, under your left patella. The music, organised in a three-parts composition for electro-acoustically prepared piano and modified pressure-chamber speakers, plays under the title Mother Goose – an homage to Maurice Ravel’s eponymous piece as well as to the popular computer game from the 1980s. “There are no backgrounds in any of these [tableaux], no vistas; only a great deal of foreground that goes back and back, endlessly, involving you in its twists and turns of [curtains and dances and films and sounds].” almost writes Margaret Atwood. Heart drops, an acceleration of a breath: there is a piano tune between the palm of my hand and the floor.
Concept & choreography Alix Eynaudi With & by Cécile Tonizzo, Hugo Le Brigand, Han-Gyeol Lie, a grand piano, Alix Eynaudi Music Paul Kotal & Han-Gyeol Lie Original Film purna virama (the last stop) by Ujjwal Kanishka Utkarsh Costumes design An Breugelmans Light design Yasemin Duru Lighting technology Martin Kreinbühel Drawings on curtain Cécile Tonizzo Accomplices Anne Faucheret, Lukas Kötz, Mark Lorimer Internship Clémence Mondoloni Admin TAKELAGE Production mollusca productions
Coproductions brut Wien, a project of the European Capital of Culture Bad Ischl Salzkammergut 2024
Residencies Kunstencentrum BUDA, Volkskundemuseum Wien
Supported by the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna, BMKOES / Federal Ministry for Art, Culture, Public Service and Sport and SKE / austro mechana. This show benefited from the support of the Institut Français d’Autriche
© Christine Miess
