Ιn December 2016 I got the news that I have received the subsidy Nieuwe Makers by the Performing Arts Fund NL, becoming an artist in residence at Gaudeamus in Utrecht; my base from 2017 till 2019. Gaudeamus is more than a new music festival; it brings together composers, performers, makers, and is being part of music networks that involve institutions across Europe and the rest of the word.
My starting point within this residency was music theatre. However, during my artistic research I soon found out that this term is not accurately defining my work. I am not anymore interested in fitting in a labeled art-form, but if I have to try frame my work, I would prefer to use the term crossover performance. Even then though, pieces I have created together with the artistic team of I/O, such as ALICE, a performative installation, wouldn’t fit in. My interest during the last few years has been to migrate from solely writing music to exploring the space between being both a composer and a stage director. An old habit I had put aside came in through the window as well: performing on stage.
In this post I have been sharing brief impressions and notes from the festivals, the artists I’ve been visiting and the projects I’ve been busy with as part of the 2-year-long residency. Most recent texts appear first. Let’s go!
2019
May 2019
May was the end of the entire Nieuwe Makers program and the residency at Gaudeamus, finishing with a presentation of re- (2nd draft) at Muziekhuis Utrecht, in collaboration with Spring Festival and the Dutch Performing Arts.
March-April 2019
These two months included the main part project re-‘s artistic research, workshop & solo rehearsals in order to present in May a 2nd draft. Next to that I had a trip to Greece to conduct research on re- and rural carnival music, dance & costumes.
February 2019
February was a busy month, during which artistic research was conducted for project re-, I travelled to London to work at Sadler’s Wells with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch & Dimitris Papaioannou for the tour of the piece Since she, Sadler’s Wells, and I had a short trip to Berlin to meet with Heiner Goebbels.
January 2019
January included the first artistic meeting for project re-‘s second phase and a trip to Zurich to attend the rehearsals and performances of Euripides Laskaridis‘ piece TITANS.
2018
November-December 2018
November started with a trip to Wuppertal to watch the performances of Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring and Cafe Müller, and continued with attending numerous documentaries at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam.
In December, I was excited to conduct the workshop Transdisciplinary Approaches at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, something I would love to further develop and repeat. Ending the year, I travelled to Athens to work with Tanztheater Wuppertal and Dimitris Papaioannou for the tour of the piece Since she (premiered in May 2017).
September-October 2018
I/O repeated re- (1st draft) at Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2018. The work-in-progress presentation went very well, with double the audience we expected; composers and new music audience, some of whom afterwards told us they got blown away by the performance. Some got drunk, consuming part of our set.
A week after GMW2018 I took the plane to Manchester to be part of Heiner Goebbels‘ new production Everything that happened and would happen at Manchester International Festival as an assistant. This is a large-scale production, involving 12 performers and 5 musicians. The rehearsals took place in the performance venue itself; an enormous abandoned railway post station. A unique experience, observing how Heiner Goebbels works and interacts with his creative team and the performers, while myself being involved in the overall creative process. The premiere took place in October with an international tour following in New York and Bochum in 2019.
August 2018
First real break after 1.5 years of work in this residency, which turned into an ethnographic trip on a mountain.
June-July 2018
An intense period of work on project re- started together with the I/O creative team, as part of atelier Spr!tzl. We decided to present a draft version of material we developed throughout the first half of 2018, under the title re- (1st draft). The work-in-progress performance took place in Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam on July 4th. We had the chance to try a lot of ideas and get inspiring feedback from a vibrant audience.
April-June 2018
Going back to Wuppertal for the last part of rehearsals with Dimitris Papaioannou and the Pina Bausch company. A very intense period with lots of work, in a process in which the material was constantly changing, as the director was shaping the performance towards the premiere. I took care of the music arrangement (research and editing), together with Stephanos Droussiotis, and did the performance’s sound design. The premiere took place in Wuppertal in May, with a international tour starting at Holland Festival in Amsterdam in June.
March 2018
Working on re-! I/O had a week-long workshop to explore performing material and check how our research should move on about this project. Our starting point is a reference video from Greece in 1996, in a night club where they would play live music and people would drink and dance. Very much looking forward to the rehearsals in June. We’ll have a draft version performed on the 4th of July as part of Spr!tzl Tage at Muziekgebouw aan’ t IJ. The premiere of this project will be in 2019.
February 2018
Off to Berlin for Transmediale 2018. This edition wasn’t as bombastic as the one of 2017 (which was celebrating its 30 year anniversary), rather disappointed I would say. Maybe I wasn’t that interested in the topic, but the level of the panel discussions and of the (just few) performances wasn’t satisfying. I realised that in this period of my life I need to focus on what a communicative performance can be, for me, and avoid any conceptualism (which I’m sure will revisit me on a later stage…).
January 2018
Moving to Athens for about a month, for the project with Tanztheater Wuppertal, we had a series of creative meetings Dimitris Papaioannou and the project’s creative team. Helped a lot to dive in the process and the piece’s emerging world.
Later in January trio GRASP premiered a new piece of mine (I’m still writing music, occasionally!) titled EKINOS, commissioned by the Onassis Cultural Centre and performed at the Panteion University as part of Music Bridge Vol. 3.
Last but not least, I had a great tryout-day together with Euripides Laskaridis, a wonderful maker and performer who will be the coach/artistic collaborator in I/O’s new project re-, as part of the upcoming Spr!tzl Tage in July.
2017
The first year of the residency brought me in many countries, visiting festivals, performances and artists. It was a min-blowing year that helped me grasp better what’s happening around us in the performing arts and in the new technologies related to spectacles.
December 2017
Ending this full year, ensemble Looptail toured in the Netherlands THIEVES; a music theatre piece we worked on together, premiered in Gaudeamus Muziekweek in 2016. It happens that these are their last performances as an ensemble – very sad because they have been such a talented, open to challenges, and hard working group of musicians.
Later in December the good news from Spr!tzl came. I am going to work at this new atelier for new makers, put together by Silbersee, A Lab, A’DAM Toren and Tolhuistuin. This will be part of creating my second and last project within the Nieuwe Makers programme, presenting a first version in July 2018 and the final performance in 2019.
My last trip in 2017 was in Paris, were I visited George Aperghis at IRCAM. I had a sneak peek of the preparations of his new project, an interdisciplinary performance commissioned by ManiFeste, IRCAM’s festival. It was very interesting to talk with him about the way he works and to see the way he and his team explore ideas throughout their early workshop (the premiere is in June 2018). I had as well the chance to visit a double installation in La Villette by William Forsythe and Ryoji Ikeda, as part of Festival d’Automne.
November 2017
November started with the two presentations of the final outcome of the music theatre research platform RE-FUSE, an artistic research program that ran for two years in collaboration with the Greek National Opera and Gaudeamus. The presentations had the form of a scenic documentary and were addressed to professionals in the fields of music, theatre and dance, as well as general audience. The reactions and the feedback we got were very warm and enthusiastic; a very nice end of the long period we’d been working together, rounding off our collective work.
I/O‘s performance installation ALICE had its second trip, this time presented in November Music, a music festival taking place each year in Den Bosch, hosting numerous artists and performances. We’re getting better in building up and down the installation, and it’s fun to tryout the performance with different audience groups (we performed 7 times in a day).
The 2nd workshop of Dimitris Papaioannou with Tanztheater Wuppertal took place at the end of the month. 12 days of intense work throughout which I was trying to observe the process, while at the same time assisting on the music/sound level. More rehearsals to take place in the beginning of the coming year, with the performance being premiered in May 2018.
October 2017
October passed by preparing the upcoming activities of the RE-FUSE platform. Travelling to Athens with the international group of the platform, we first started with an educational workshop for young artists that took place at the Greek National Opera, sharing the tools and approaches we devised throughout the platform’s 2-year-long research.
September 2017
Each September Gaudeamus Muziekweek takes place, my current artistic home. The edition of 2017 was quite bombastic with a rich variety of events spanning from concert music, electronic music and music theatre to sound installations. As part of the festival, we presented ALICE, devised by I/O; directed by myself in collaboration with the set/light designer Roelof Pothuis and the creative coder David Jonas. This is my first project within the Nieuwe Makers program and the GMW residency, further performed in festivals and venues throughout the season (photos taken by David Jonas). In addition, the festival invited Heiner Goebbels as a guest composer and lecturer, and I made sure not to miss the chance to meet him in person to discuss about music theatre and future plans. It was a quite inspiring talk and gave me confidence to move on with my adventure in combining composing with stage directing.
Next to ALICE, there was a presentation of the research music theatre platform RE-FUSE, of which I am the artistic coordinator. RE-FUSE is a collaboration between GMW and the Greek National Opera. The presentation had a hybrid form: it was a scenic documentary about the platform itself and the pilot team’s research period throughout 2016 and 2017. The pilot team consists of 11 artists from various artistic backgrounds and worked together in a series of physical workshops in Utrecht and Athens, and online roundtables. We are now building a website to host or the material generated, while there is a presentation planned in Athens coming November.
August 2017
August signalled the beginning of my internship next to Dimitris Papaioannou while he is working on his new performance with Tanztheater Wuppertal, Pina Bausch’s legendary company. It is a very special circumstance that makes me feel very lucky to be involved in. I remember myself around 20 years old, when I was a composition student, watching on film The Complaint of an Empress and feeling very close to that world. Somehow my further composition studies drew me away – the memory of that film came back to me only midst this first visit at Tanztheater Wuppertal. While attending the come-to-know workshop of the project I had the chance to meet all the company’s dancers, as well as work together with Papaioannou’s team by assisting in the documentation of the rehearsals and the workshop’s needs in sound/music. More visits to Wuppertal to come throughout the season.
Here is a related article at the Greek edition of Huffington Post.
Some photos of the first workshop at Tanztheater Wuppertal by Julian Mommert and myself:
July 2017
Time to go find the sun and swim (ok I actually was working all month on my laptop preparing ALICE).
June 2017
Holland Festival takes place every year throughout the entire month of June, and it was, as expected, a month full of performances to watch and listen to. There is a very unique tradition in this festival of hosting a good amount of music theatre performances, something I really enjoy. But above all, I enjoy the fact that the audience can attend performances of important music/dance/theatre companies from all over the world.
As part of the Nieuwe Makers programme, I contacted the HF and managed to attend the few rehearsals of some of the festival’s productions. First performance to attend was Dimitris Papaioannou‘s Inside, which was presented as a video installation. Then Romeo Castellucci‘s new production Democracy in America, however without attending the rehearsals – same happened with The Nation (1-3) by Eric de Vroedt and the Nationale Theater. Then a production by Ensemble Musikfabrik in collaboration with Mouse on Mars. Interesting to be at the dress rehearsal and check the time needed for all the soundcheck. Later on I attended two rehearsals of Dmitri Kourliandski‘s new opera production in collaboration with the Stanislavksy Electrotheatre, quite a large production with many people on and behind stage, however he didn’t use any musical instruments – only voices and electronics. Then I jumped in to Dimitris Papaioannou’s new production The Great Tamer, of which I attended all preparations and both performances. Intense two weeks during which I got a lot to think about artistically, as well as on the practical side of things.
May 2017
May was a very busy month project-wise, however, I managed to join a day of the FIBER Festival in Amsterdam. This year’s edition had the title PRIMA MATERIA, with a quite inspiring conference that mixed alchemy with today’s technologies. I find that when technology is blended with a spirituality (let’s say of any kind) or the essence of consciousness, the results are always interesting (even if uncanny). How do we (co-)exist in a technological world of our times – and even more the times to come -, while leaving behind the rational, square and hierarchical relationship between us and technology; a relation that was created back in the industrial era (the mind as a newtonian machine)?
April 2017
Reflection month…
March 2017
Moving on with the residency, in March I had the chance to visit STRP biennale in Eindhoven and take advantage of a trip I made to Athens, to meet artists in whose work I’m interested and attend some of their rehearsals.
In Athens I was lucky enough to attend a concert by the Arditti Quartet that I had missed in Amsterdam during Sound Acts past January, playing the piece by Jennifer Walshe EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT. In this piece of hers the composer performs on stage together with the string quartet. The day after the concert Jennifer Walshe gave a lecture about her work, during which I felt very close to her ways of creating and composing pieces on stage. I have to contact her again in the near future.
Next came a coffee talk I had with one of Greece’s most interesting composers in the field of music for theatre. Dimitris Kamarotos has collaborated with most of Greece’s theatre directors, always being present throughout the entire process of making a theatre play. What I am interested in is the way he works together with a theatre director, in many cases applying compositional tools and strategies to the staging process.
My trip ended by attending a couple of rehearsals. The first was a rehearsal of the Divine Comedy, a theatre adaptation of Dante’s massive work by the theatre company Vasistas. The company is interested in the music of language and the physical presence on stage. I’ve been following their work for the last 5 years and I see a gradual transition towards more musical results, searching for a balance between a narrative and abstraction – something that bothers me as well. I guess it has to do with the presence of textual meaning and how to explore ways to work with it. The second rehearsal was the one of TITANES, a new production by theatre maker Euripides Laskaridis. I’m very interested in his work, which combines physicality, movement, sound, set, costume and light design, putting everything together in a dialogue; contrasts, counterpoint, homophony, change of stage rhythm. Everything soldered under an ambivalent sense of humour, sometimes funny, others strange and weird. The performance will make a European tour, passing as well by Julidans in Amsterdam coming summer.
After returning to the Netherlands, last stop for March was STRP biennale in Eindhoven. I attended both days of the Conference for the Curious, where I had the chance to listen to lectures of quite a few very interesting technology artists, hackers and scientists from all over the world. A highlight at the conference was Kevin Kelly’s keynote. I must mention as well Sissel Tolaas, a smell artist and chemist who made a strong impression on me, both with her work and her attitude; quite inspiring. The second day was led by the VPRO medialab, dedicated to the storytelling of today. My colleague at I/O, set and light designer Roelof Pothuis, joined me. It was nice to have someone to discuss with about all this input. Among the program’s conference we found some time to go visit the biennale’s EXPO. Food for thought, especially when asking ourselves why some pieces had certain similarities (in design, space usage, artistic decisions), how does the EXPO dialects with its audience, how does an installation become extrovert and communicative towards an audience.
February 2017
My residency started with a crazy February full of new input, visiting Transmediale in Berlin, the Impuls Academy in Graz and the Brandstichter and Sonic Acts festivals in Amsterdam.
This year Transmediale celebrated its 30 years with the festival ever elusive, which took place at the just-renovated Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Starting as a video festival, it gradually shifted from film to VHS and into the digital era, focusing on the contemporary media culture and new technologies in the performing arts. The festival’s conference brought together thinkers, scientists and artists from many different fields (technopolitics, technosurveillance, technoecology, machine learning, AI, anthropology, sociology, etc.). Central theme was the relation between human and non-human ontologies today, and our position in a world of emerging interactions among us and the machines, as well as among the machines themselves.
The festival included numerous events every day (in combination with the CTM festival) and the attendance was so high that we had to be in the cue 15′-20′ in advance to ensure we could enter the sold out talks and panels. Big plus is that all events were broadcasted live, so all smartphones, tablets and computers in the corridors and the foyers were tuned in.
You can listen to all talks and panels on the Transmediale’s audio archive.
Brandstichter took place in Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg throughout February with multiple performances by the German collective of stage directors Rimini Protokoll. I had the chance to talk with Stefan Kaegi,one of the three stage directors, about how he works, what he thinks about performers, how he thinks of music in his projects, how it was studying with Heiner Goebbels, and about his background in journalism.
Among other productions of theirs, I managed to attend (because the verb watch is not really appropriate) Situations Rooms and Nachlass, both being a hybrid between an installation and a theatre play. The audience enters the set and becomes either a performer or a listener who’s able to explore the space and have the chance to be in the position of the story teller. Rimini Protokoll do documentation theatre avoiding using performers on stage, collaborating with specialists who will to share a story with an audience.
The Spraakmakers event during the festival was a very good idea, bringing us on an empty stage together with the collective. The makers talked about some of their most important projects and shared with us concerns and insights about the way they work. Fun moment was when Stefan Kaegi did chat roulette with us all on his laptop’s camera and random people on the other end being totally puzzled.
The Impuls Academy was such a busy place. Over 250 composers and performers with lectures, reading sessions, rehearsals, private lessons, workshops and concerts taking place simultaneously at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz. The great Klangforum Wien musicians played in various concerts and reading sessions, alongside the instrumentalists tutors of the Academy. Renowned composers gave lectures and private lessons as well, such as Enno Poppe, Mark Andre, Rebecca Saunders, Simon Steen-Andersen, Dmitri Kourliandski, Stefan Prins and others.
The tutors and the participants came from all over the world, and of course I met there lots of people I already new, from the Netherlands and abroad – in lectures, concerts and bars. Lots of beer and discussions over music. My skype call with Beat Furrer included sharing of thoughts on music theatre, what can music theatre be, who are our performers, how different ways of preparing/rehearsing lead to different results.
It’s touching to see that the musicians of Klangforum Wien, who have reached such a high level of music making – especially in the field of new music – are so nice and curious people, open to new ideas, wanting to express themselves through music and carrying no boastfulness at all. Makes me think of younger (or older as well) new music ensembles across Europe that try to give value to themselves by looking back to older decades and to older attitudes towards music, when everything had to be strict, conceptual, with an obsession in being emotionless and abstract. It is very interesting to see how things are changing, how communication on stage becomes nowadays very important – at least for those who are open to listen what is really happening today around us. It’s not a coincidence that in one of the panels Enno Poppe leaded the discussion towards emotions.
Being exhausted from all the lectures, rehearsals and performances, I decided to attend one of the three days of Sonic Acts and still I found myself nocked out after 14 hours of conference talks and audiovisual performances. The conference took place in Brakke Grond, funny enough one of the lecturers was a lecturer in Transmediale too. It was anyway clear these two festivals share a common ground. The performances of the festival’s 3rd day took place in Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ. Once again we all enjoyed the versatility of the venue – not only of the main hall, but of the entire building as well. I had to leave at 00:30 – the program continued in Bimhuis till 04:00.
It feels good to have a festival of this kind in Amsterdam, which invites numerous artists and thinkers/scientists from all over the world while involving institutions such as, among others, the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam’s contemporary art museum), Muziekgebouw (a high-end hall dedicated to new music) and Brakke Grond (Amsterdam’s Flemish cultural centre).
The beginning:
Thanasis Deligiannis 