la biennale di venezia
EXTREME BIENNALE MUSICA 2012
Francesca Verunelli:
Serial Sevens for seven singers and two percussionists.
Neue Vocalsolisten/Teatro alle Tese
http://www.ilcorrieremusicale.it/teatro-in-musica-idee-radicalmente-divergenti/
Oresste Bossini/ Biennale Musica 2012
...the excellent work of the stage director - a "mise en espace" with a large employment of video- gives a theatrical dimension to a work without any kind of theatre: the seven sicks, dressed in white and leaned out of a rail as little angels in a sacred aedicule is an image that remains in the memory; while the video of a tailor's dummy in black and white (a ideal body without head that refers to some kind of Magritte clear madness) on which a suit takes his form is a nice counterpoint to the progressive deformation of the memory of the protagonists...
For the rest, some national newspapers [as manifesto, repubblica] just slammed the entire biennale, and some other [il corriere della sera] just gave a general description of the festival.
Helsinki Newspaper 17th.November 2012
The performance was a kind of conceptual painting in which the Stuttgart-based Neue Vocalsolisten sang excerpts collected from people from memory disorder. Verunelli had succeeded in developing his own special grammar for a chatty, mechanical vowel expression, accompanied by a video about Ekström's meticulous craftsmanship. Some strange, surreal connection was found between these two opposing processes.
Anja Füsti und Pascal Pons, percussionists
Kristiina Helin, Direction
Original video Man Before a Mirror: Saara Ekström
recutting Saara Ekström and Kristiina Helin
Lotta Esko, Set and Costumedesign
Jan Fedinger, Light design
The Voice and Musical Theatre
Voice, theatre and music are a terrain for experimentation with infinite possibilities and a powerful impact in terms of image and communication: the multiplicity of elements at work, gesture word dramaturgy sound image, can lead to a ‘concerto scenico’, a melodrama, a micro-opera, instrumental theatre, performance, art song, sprechoper. In this field, the Biennale has engaged in an annual commitment with Musik der Jahrhunderte of Stuttgart to produce new experimental chamber music pieces. This year, two thirty-year-olds, Francesca Verunelli, the winner of the Silver Lion at the 2009 Music Biennale, and Giovanni Bertelli will each, separately, stage their first musical theatre work on October 10th at the Teatro alle Tese (8:30 PM). Serial Sevens by Francesca Verunelli is inspired by the dark knots of memory, referring in the title to a real clinical test used to assess the degree of memory and concentration, but also to the 7 voices of the performers and the texts, all of them anonymous, taken from actual conversations between doctors and patients, which open spaces within an unspoken world; AMGD, which stands for “aesthetica more geometrico demonstrata”, and was also an anagram with which musicians of centuries past signed their works and which meant “ad maiorem dei gloriam”, is built with a recurring chain of actions, inspired by a statistic process known as the “Markov chain”, repeated five times, with different variations each time. Equally interesting will be the interpretation of the stage director, who for both works will be Finnish director Kristiina Helin, a long-time student of Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba.
Kristiina Helin, Direction
Original video Man Before a Mirror: Saara Ekström
recutting Saara Ekström and Kristiina Helin
Lotta Esko, Set and Costumedesign
Jan Fedinger, Light design
The Voice and Musical Theatre
Voice, theatre and music are a terrain for experimentation with infinite possibilities and a powerful impact in terms of image and communication: the multiplicity of elements at work, gesture word dramaturgy sound image, can lead to a ‘concerto scenico’, a melodrama, a micro-opera, instrumental theatre, performance, art song, sprechoper. In this field, the Biennale has engaged in an annual commitment with Musik der Jahrhunderte of Stuttgart to produce new experimental chamber music pieces. This year, two thirty-year-olds, Francesca Verunelli, the winner of the Silver Lion at the 2009 Music Biennale, and Giovanni Bertelli will each, separately, stage their first musical theatre work on October 10th at the Teatro alle Tese (8:30 PM). Serial Sevens by Francesca Verunelli is inspired by the dark knots of memory, referring in the title to a real clinical test used to assess the degree of memory and concentration, but also to the 7 voices of the performers and the texts, all of them anonymous, taken from actual conversations between doctors and patients, which open spaces within an unspoken world; AMGD, which stands for “aesthetica more geometrico demonstrata”, and was also an anagram with which musicians of centuries past signed their works and which meant “ad maiorem dei gloriam”, is built with a recurring chain of actions, inspired by a statistic process known as the “Markov chain”, repeated five times, with different variations each time. Equally interesting will be the interpretation of the stage director, who for both works will be Finnish director Kristiina Helin, a long-time student of Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba.