Special Projects
Butterfly Effect Ensemble
Live-Composition
Stephen Horenstein, Woodwinds
Jeffery Kowalsky, Percussion
Lior Navok, Piano
Butterfly Effect is a cutting-edge ensemble creating dreamlike episodes with live performance, sound and visual imaging. This rare meeting of three veteran Israel musical creators, along with guest visual artists, results in an experience touching the subliminal, unexpected and surreal. The group’s hallmark is an inner communication built from years of collaborative composition. The ensemble’s sound is built from extremes: from extremely spacious and meditative spaces, to dense, primitive primal screams. Real-time composition creates an on-stage “drama” of discovery-three musicians taking a chance in real time, building miniature “worlds”, one by one, like islands in an archipelago, or pictures in a gallery. Each piece has its own unique feeling, tone and message. The overall effect is a sublime acoustic and visual experience, a blend of the ancient and modern.
The large array of instruments include: percussion (water gongs, vibraphone, amplified cymbals, roto toms, heat sink, Thailand nipple gongs, Indian chinta, roto toms, wood saws, bass drum, etc.); woodwinds (bass flute, alto flute, bass clarinet, soprano and baritone saxophones, Chinese flutes, bamboo saxophones, Tibetan double reed instruments, Irish flute, various ethnic double reed instruments)); and keyboards (grand piano with array of sticks and beaters, prepared piano).
From the Debut CD THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS:
| Twisted Sand | Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. |
| The Lost Sheep | Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. |
| The Natives are Restless | Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. |
Music and Poetry – Face to Face
The Israeli composer Lior Navok and the U.S. poet D. Nurkse have crafted an evening of experimental dialogue between music and poetry. Since meeting at the MacDowell Colony, the artists have recorded and performed collaborations in which music and poetry don’t just illustrate each other, but interact in innovative ways. Navok and Nurkse use improvisation, original texts, and classic texts in several languages. The result is a living conversation, an always-new one to two hour program which has been structured dramatically. Music and Poetry: Face to Face is an accessible meeting of minds, cultures, and disciplines, which leaves audiences with a new sense of the possibilities of the arts.
Sound: Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Space Marriage
The Granite Coast
Searchers
Rei Aliena
inFlux Dance Company (Berne)
“Rei Aliena” is a big title for a series of small episodes. The aim of the choreography is precisely to underline this contrast. It plays with associations, rapid sequences of thought, and it does so in a light manner that is firmly rooted in everyday life.
“Rei Aliena” transforms the side issue into the main issue. Everyday matters and side issues appear, are repeated, acquire greater meaning through repetition and become the focus of attention. A new impulse from outside shakes up the routine, makes it thrash about, wriggle and try to muddle through. The ostensibly irrelevant, routine episode changes, forms a contrast with itself, develops into something new and becomes a new irrelevance which is the focus of the happening. The process then starts over again.”Rei Aliena” plays with constellations of characters and possibilities of action. Unpredictable incidents create a microcosmos of figures and actions which are everyday in origin, but mingled with absurd and surreal images. On the basis of the composition for piano entitled “
The Old Photo Box” by Lior Navok, Lucía Baumgartner has devised a choreographic sequence of images and episodes. The twenty short piano pieces accompany people in everyday situations and describe fragments of action. Like photographs, they capture a single moment. A photograph can be returned to again and again, and this is what Lucía Baumgartner does in “Rei Aliena”. The captured moment is the starting point for an episode, it is then transformed by external impulses, becomes a new moment which in its turn is captured. This new moment then becomes the starting point for a new episode.
This interaction between the traditional and the new, between the routine and the unpredictable, is also reflected in the casting of “Rei Aliena”: depending on the venue, the permanent dancers work together during a brief rehearsal phase with locally-based dancers, and this gives the choreography fresh inputs.
Duration: 65 minutes (with live-piano) / 55 minutes (without live-piano)
| Artistic direction & concept: | Lucía Baumgartner (CH/E) |
| Choreography: |
Lucía Baumgartner in in collaboration with participants. |
| Dance: |
Sarah Duc (CH), Tekeal Riley (CA), Mélina Faka (GR) Guestdancers: local dancers |
| Music: |
Lior Navok (IL) |
| Live Piano: | Sarah Bob (USA) |
| Lightdesign: | hellblau (CH/D) |
| Costume: |
Sarah Bachmann (CH). |
Soliloquy
inFlux Dance Company (Berne)
Surreal getting in touch In shirt and trousers, barefoot and head over heels in a suitcase (a metaphor par excellence for the mobility of a dancer’s life) Duméril pushes the prop through the partially lit space- until he bumps into an obstacle, his alter ego, Sipho Manashe. He ‘looks’ blindly with the pale sole of his foot directly into the dark-skinned person’s eyes. A surreal way of getting in touch in which the energy circle between the two dancers copleates itself. From then onwards the two cannot be without one another. And not without the suitcase: as home of the unconscious, it imposes itself between their movements, separates and connects them. This contains potential, even more so when the suitcase appears as partner or as rival which reflects the movements through imitation. Who is moving whom? The boundaries between the dead prop and the moving bodies dissolve. Just as the boundaries dissolve between the two soloists, whose pathways repeatedly intertwine through the dynamic game of attraction and repulsion, proximity and distance, aggression and tenderness. Doing instead of just thinking, is an upshot of the presented inner monologue which is strongest in the moments where it stays in physical abstraction; the intermezzo with the soap bubbles remains a foreign body. The fact that ‘Soliloquy’ is not a continuous composition but rather an addition of building blocks which glides from scene to scene (with an irritating fallacy before the end), is its only weakness. Otherwise it is a dense, conceptually convincing piece of musical and dance work. Through their strong stage presence, Sipho Manashe and Félix Duméril succeed in precise, installation-like balancing moments of highest eloquence. At the end there is only one of them left on stage and the message is clear and vivid: duality is broken open, healed. In a powerful finale of spinning, the suitcase starts flying, freeing the initial energy of inversion through a centrifugal force. Liberated. Marianne Mühlemann, Der Bund 3. February 2007
| Artistic Direction and Concept: | Lucía Baumgartner |
| Choreography: | Lucía Baumgartner |
| Choreographic Assistence: | Sarah Duc Dance Félix Duméril / Sarah Duc, Sipho Manashe / Lucia Baumgartner |
| Music: | Lior Navok |
| Text: |
LouAnn Cennerazzo |
| Voice: |
Sipho Manashe / LouAnn Cennerazzo |
| Sound Edition: |
Sam Baur |
| Light: |
hellblau |
Solo Piano and Movement Theatre
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Sifting through a box of old photographs on his attic; an elderly man confronts his past and questions the decisions that shaped his life. In a unique collaboration of mime and solo piano, Bill Bowers and Sarah Bob take the audience on a journey into the heart of one man’s story.
| Movement Theatre: | Bill Bowers |
| Piano: | Sarah Bob |
| Directed by: | Scott Illingworth |
| Based on The Old Photo Box composed by: | Lior Navok |
Duration: 50 Minutes
Wolkenfänger
inFlux Dance Company (Berne)
Imagine: Ashe always does a man leaves his house and walks down the street. Today his arm decides to catch a cloud from the sky.
Until now, the arm did not do anything other than what came to the man’s mind. It reached out when the man wanted to grab his hat, it served as a support when the man read his newspaper at the breakfast table, it shook hands with innumerable amounts of people and dangled nonchalantly through the air or simply hung beside the man’s torso. Most of all, the man never really paid it any attention. But now it’s enough. The arm begins with a harmless twitch. Could it really be that the arm has a mind of its own? Convinced that it was only his imagination, the man continues as if nothing happened. However, doubt sneaks in and soon the arm proves to have only just begun. There is still a long way to the sky…
| Choreography: | Lucía Baumgartner (inFlux) |
| Dance: | Félix Duméril |
| Music: | Lior Navok |
| Length: | 15 Min |
| Solo Premiere: | 1st May 2006 Gala #10 (STEPS #10 Internationales Tanzfestival Schweiz) then tour through Switzerland with STEPS A Co-produktion mit STEPS #10 Internationales Tanzfestival Schweiz. |
