ELISCHA KAMINER
composer | director | sound artist
composer | director | sound artist
_tableau/vivant
musictheatre for two violinists, live-video, objects and electronics
premiere: Roy. O Disney Hall, Los Angeles 2016
duration: 1h
credit: composition / choreography / direction
performers: Sara Cubarsi, Mayah Kadish
With texts by The Pointer Sisters, T.S. Eliot, Recon Gay Fetish App, Wikipedia, Sara Cubarsi, Mayah Kadish and Elischa Kaminer
This is all there is. Nothing new under the sun. In the forest by the lake, there grew daisies, small, pathetic daisies. We did not dream any of this. These are not our oldest memories. Seven years ago, i remember my mother was standing next to me. The magical turtle didn't say anything. We play on its tortoise shell, and can not remember what happened in the first place. There were concentration camps yes, and candy shops, make up and a swing and my grandmother in Buchenwald and magnolia (or almond?) petals were raining down at the exact point of the fingerboard and scissors under sheets, at one point i swapped violins with my sister, but we can not remember any of it. And when i tried to tell you the story of the Lo-Shu square, you were him, there was glitter on his shoulder and the three of us climbed up the grassy moss wall.
tableau vivant is an ongoing exercise in remembering, re-enacting and becoming a fabric woven out of our collective dream-memories and an intuition to understand the amalgam of time, memory and space as an inherently musical substance. The composer's score, similar to the scene, becomes the continuously evolving, living tableau itself, an at once static and fluid matrix. The space in return becomes a score in its own right, inscribed by the performers bodies.
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_ITCHEE: BRIEFin collaboration with Ines Wuttke and Gaia Vogel
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Dear collegues,
Dear fellow space travellers,
Dear co-discoveres,
as part of 5a7’s exhibition opening at ArtEz (13th October), the performance and research collective ICHEE (International Centre for human Quantum and Encounter Engineering) is warmly inviting you to participate in the first part of our study series brief(ed) encounters as part of our ongoing work in the field of post-brangelinian studies.
The performance will take place at 4.30 pm right before the exhibition opening of 5a7 - and is limited to twenty participants. If you would like to attend this event, please email ichee.research@gmail.com with your full name and age to reserve a place.
Our team at ICHEE is very much looking forward to hearing from you.
Very warm best wishes,
ICHEE (International Centre for Human Quantum and Encounter Engineering)
“(...) For our original nature was by no means the same as it is now. In the first place, there were three kinds of human beings, not merely the two sexes, male and female, as at present: there was a third kind as well, which had equal shares of the other two, and whose name survives though, the thing itself has vanished. For ‘man-woman’ was then a unity in form no less than name, composed of both sexes and sharing equally in male and female(...)”
The International Centre for Human Quantum and Encounter Engineering (ICHEE) is a research and artists collective founded in the mid 1980s in Bochum, Germany with the aim of nurturing a cross-discipline polylogue within-and out the fields of molecular biology, sociology, quantum-physics, psychology, sonology and performance studies. In early publications, such as Seeing the world through Utz (1984), Rhizome Etudes (1991) and An Encyclopaedia of all things sticky (1992), the notion of glue crystallized as a central concept of the centre’s research focus and, in 2016, led to the establishing of the research field of Post-Brangelinian Studies. Starting from the Faustian exclamation ‘That I may perceive whatever holds // the world together in its inmost folds’, ICHEE’s work oscillates and mediates between physical and meta-physical aggregate states of an understanding of glue, once more, within-and out situations of human interconnectivity.
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_nachtklang
staged concert
for mixed ensemble
concept: mayah kadish
performance: ensemble x.y.
premiere: altes stadtbad, annaberg-buchholz musikfest erzgebirge 2016
duration: 30min credit: composer
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at the intersection of old and new music, ensemble x.y. is presenting and reinventing new interpratations of music by monteverdi, de rore and machaut in the setting of the old swimming house of annaberg-buchholz.
http://www.musikfest-erzgebirge.de/veranstaltung/3-nachtklang
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_dark pools high potentials
by choreographer inge gappmeier
for two dancers
premiere: institut für angewandte theaterwissenschaften, gießen 2015
duration: 1h
credit: music / sound design
website: https://ingegappmaier.wordpress.com/dphp
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© pictures by hanke wilsman
programme note (german):
Dark Pool. High Potentials ist ein Duett zum Thema Spiel, imaginierte Welten und deren Anwendung und Einsatz in unserer heutigen Gesellschaft. Der Körper, in seiner Materialität wie auch in seinem Selbstverständnis, wird dabei in Verhältnis zu Linien und Flow, Regeln und Grenzen sowie In- bzw. Exklusion als auch in Bezug auf Strategien der Selbstoptimierung in Frage gestellt und herausgefordert.
Ausgehend von einer sechseckigen Bühnenfläche, die von den Zuschauern von drei Seiten eingesehen werden kann, löst sich das Tanzstück in eine begehbare Installation auf.
Das Bühnenbild, ein aus weißen Gummischnüren bestehender, anfangs flacher Raster am Boden, öffnet sich in den Raum und wird an Ende in den gesamten Bühnen- und Zuschauerraum gewebt.
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_chaconne (prefaces)
for solo violin and dancer
in collaboration with mayah kadish and youri yongenelen
premiere: korzo theatre, the haguge, september 2014
duration: 30min
credit: music, direction
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programme note of the premiere:
Chaconne (Prefaces) is a duo for violin and dancer, based on Bach's Chaconne for solo violin, written for Mayah Kadish and Youri Jongenelen by Elischa Kaminer.
The piece is based around the strangely sacred nature of Bach’s Chaconne, a piece of music that
through time has gathered an untouchability that makes it all the more sought after and all the
more impossible. Many believe it was written just after Bach had learned of his first and beloved wife's death. In the fullness of the harmonies, brought to life by an instrument usually used for melody and not harmony, there seems to be a broadening of self and a multiplicity that can take you out of solitude. And yet by way of its perfection, by way of its untouchable aura, it excludes. Keeps you out.
Elischa Kaminer has written a piece that is inspired by and inquires into the polarities involved in Bach's Chaconne. A main concern when working on the music as well as the choreography of Preface was a critical reflection upon the nature of virtuosity in both dance and music and the dichotomy between visible effort and seeming effortlessness. The question of when virtuosity becomes sheer mechanical process, and when it becomes a vessel for artistic expression was central to the work.
During the performance layers of interconnection between the music of Preface and the dancer’s movements as well as material of the original Chaconne become visible and both the dancer and the violinist gradually carve structures of Bach’s music out of at first seemingly unrelated vocabulary, slowly unfolding gestural, melodic, rhythmic and harmonic ideas of the original chaconne like a sculpture in the making.
The music of Chaconne (Prefaces) consists of three parts, Prefaces I, II and III, mirroring the tertiary form of Bach’s Chaconne. Equally each movement derives its motivic vocabulary from the equivalent section of Bach’s Chaconne. Bach’s Chaconne is based on a single bass line, which through constant variation and relentless repetition always appears in a new light. The bass line of the Chaconne was also the starting point for Kaminer’s composition of Preface. In the first two Prefaces it is hidden, but then becomes the main protagonist in the piece’s closing movement, Preface III.
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_layla layla
for 8 dancers, flute, harp and electronics
in collaboration with choreographer rosie whitney fish
premiere: spitalfields music festival, london 2012
duration: 10 min
credit: music, direction
layla layla is part of a sight-specific tour throughout london’s spitalfields area, staging new pieces of music and dance at hawksmore’s christ church, charnel house, spitalfields market and bishopsgate library
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musictheatre for two violinists, live-video, objects and electronics
premiere: Roy. O Disney Hall, Los Angeles 2016
duration: 1h
credit: composition / choreography / direction
performers: Sara Cubarsi, Mayah Kadish
With texts by The Pointer Sisters, T.S. Eliot, Recon Gay Fetish App, Wikipedia, Sara Cubarsi, Mayah Kadish and Elischa Kaminer
This is all there is. Nothing new under the sun. In the forest by the lake, there grew daisies, small, pathetic daisies. We did not dream any of this. These are not our oldest memories. Seven years ago, i remember my mother was standing next to me. The magical turtle didn't say anything. We play on its tortoise shell, and can not remember what happened in the first place. There were concentration camps yes, and candy shops, make up and a swing and my grandmother in Buchenwald and magnolia (or almond?) petals were raining down at the exact point of the fingerboard and scissors under sheets, at one point i swapped violins with my sister, but we can not remember any of it. And when i tried to tell you the story of the Lo-Shu square, you were him, there was glitter on his shoulder and the three of us climbed up the grassy moss wall.
tableau vivant is an ongoing exercise in remembering, re-enacting and becoming a fabric woven out of our collective dream-memories and an intuition to understand the amalgam of time, memory and space as an inherently musical substance. The composer's score, similar to the scene, becomes the continuously evolving, living tableau itself, an at once static and fluid matrix. The space in return becomes a score in its own right, inscribed by the performers bodies.
_ITCHEE: BRIEFin collaboration with Ines Wuttke and Gaia Vogel
Dear collegues,
Dear fellow space travellers,
Dear co-discoveres,
as part of 5a7’s exhibition opening at ArtEz (13th October), the performance and research collective ICHEE (International Centre for human Quantum and Encounter Engineering) is warmly inviting you to participate in the first part of our study series brief(ed) encounters as part of our ongoing work in the field of post-brangelinian studies.
The performance will take place at 4.30 pm right before the exhibition opening of 5a7 - and is limited to twenty participants. If you would like to attend this event, please email ichee.research@gmail.com with your full name and age to reserve a place.
Our team at ICHEE is very much looking forward to hearing from you.
Very warm best wishes,
ICHEE (International Centre for Human Quantum and Encounter Engineering)
“(...) For our original nature was by no means the same as it is now. In the first place, there were three kinds of human beings, not merely the two sexes, male and female, as at present: there was a third kind as well, which had equal shares of the other two, and whose name survives though, the thing itself has vanished. For ‘man-woman’ was then a unity in form no less than name, composed of both sexes and sharing equally in male and female(...)”
The International Centre for Human Quantum and Encounter Engineering (ICHEE) is a research and artists collective founded in the mid 1980s in Bochum, Germany with the aim of nurturing a cross-discipline polylogue within-and out the fields of molecular biology, sociology, quantum-physics, psychology, sonology and performance studies. In early publications, such as Seeing the world through Utz (1984), Rhizome Etudes (1991) and An Encyclopaedia of all things sticky (1992), the notion of glue crystallized as a central concept of the centre’s research focus and, in 2016, led to the establishing of the research field of Post-Brangelinian Studies. Starting from the Faustian exclamation ‘That I may perceive whatever holds // the world together in its inmost folds’, ICHEE’s work oscillates and mediates between physical and meta-physical aggregate states of an understanding of glue, once more, within-and out situations of human interconnectivity.
_nachtklang
staged concert
for mixed ensemble
concept: mayah kadish
performance: ensemble x.y.
premiere: altes stadtbad, annaberg-buchholz musikfest erzgebirge 2016
duration: 30min credit: composer
at the intersection of old and new music, ensemble x.y. is presenting and reinventing new interpratations of music by monteverdi, de rore and machaut in the setting of the old swimming house of annaberg-buchholz.
http://www.musikfest-erzgebirge.de/veranstaltung/3-nachtklang
_dark pools high potentials
by choreographer inge gappmeier
for two dancers
premiere: institut für angewandte theaterwissenschaften, gießen 2015
duration: 1h
credit: music / sound design
website: https://ingegappmaier.wordpress.com/dphp
programme note (german):
Dark Pool. High Potentials ist ein Duett zum Thema Spiel, imaginierte Welten und deren Anwendung und Einsatz in unserer heutigen Gesellschaft. Der Körper, in seiner Materialität wie auch in seinem Selbstverständnis, wird dabei in Verhältnis zu Linien und Flow, Regeln und Grenzen sowie In- bzw. Exklusion als auch in Bezug auf Strategien der Selbstoptimierung in Frage gestellt und herausgefordert.
Ausgehend von einer sechseckigen Bühnenfläche, die von den Zuschauern von drei Seiten eingesehen werden kann, löst sich das Tanzstück in eine begehbare Installation auf.
Das Bühnenbild, ein aus weißen Gummischnüren bestehender, anfangs flacher Raster am Boden, öffnet sich in den Raum und wird an Ende in den gesamten Bühnen- und Zuschauerraum gewebt.
_chaconne (prefaces)
for solo violin and dancer
in collaboration with mayah kadish and youri yongenelen
premiere: korzo theatre, the haguge, september 2014
duration: 30min
credit: music, direction
programme note of the premiere:
Chaconne (Prefaces) is a duo for violin and dancer, based on Bach's Chaconne for solo violin, written for Mayah Kadish and Youri Jongenelen by Elischa Kaminer.
The piece is based around the strangely sacred nature of Bach’s Chaconne, a piece of music that
through time has gathered an untouchability that makes it all the more sought after and all the
more impossible. Many believe it was written just after Bach had learned of his first and beloved wife's death. In the fullness of the harmonies, brought to life by an instrument usually used for melody and not harmony, there seems to be a broadening of self and a multiplicity that can take you out of solitude. And yet by way of its perfection, by way of its untouchable aura, it excludes. Keeps you out.
Elischa Kaminer has written a piece that is inspired by and inquires into the polarities involved in Bach's Chaconne. A main concern when working on the music as well as the choreography of Preface was a critical reflection upon the nature of virtuosity in both dance and music and the dichotomy between visible effort and seeming effortlessness. The question of when virtuosity becomes sheer mechanical process, and when it becomes a vessel for artistic expression was central to the work.
During the performance layers of interconnection between the music of Preface and the dancer’s movements as well as material of the original Chaconne become visible and both the dancer and the violinist gradually carve structures of Bach’s music out of at first seemingly unrelated vocabulary, slowly unfolding gestural, melodic, rhythmic and harmonic ideas of the original chaconne like a sculpture in the making.
The music of Chaconne (Prefaces) consists of three parts, Prefaces I, II and III, mirroring the tertiary form of Bach’s Chaconne. Equally each movement derives its motivic vocabulary from the equivalent section of Bach’s Chaconne. Bach’s Chaconne is based on a single bass line, which through constant variation and relentless repetition always appears in a new light. The bass line of the Chaconne was also the starting point for Kaminer’s composition of Preface. In the first two Prefaces it is hidden, but then becomes the main protagonist in the piece’s closing movement, Preface III.
_layla layla
for 8 dancers, flute, harp and electronics
in collaboration with choreographer rosie whitney fish
premiere: spitalfields music festival, london 2012
duration: 10 min
credit: music, direction
layla layla is part of a sight-specific tour throughout london’s spitalfields area, staging new pieces of music and dance at hawksmore’s christ church, charnel house, spitalfields market and bishopsgate library