ARCHIV
24.04.2010 21:00 Odessa, Philharmonie
21.00 Shadowboxing ~ 60`
A musical scenic course by Michael Heisch and Daniel Mouthon
in collaboration with the ensemble für neue musik zürich (CH)
performed by
Jeannine Hirzel voice
Kathrin Ritz boxer
Irene M.Wrabel boxer (actress)
Michael Heisch boxer
Tobias Gerber boxer
Luigi Archetti visual performer
Johan Herak light / scenography
AND
ensemble für neue musik zürich(CH)
Hans-Peter Frehner flute
Manfred Spitaler clarinet
Viktor Müller keyboard
Lorenz Haas percussion
Urs Bumbacher violin
Nicola Romanò cello
Shadow Boxing – a Musical and Scenic Course
By Michael Heisch and Daniel Mouthon in cooperation with the “ensemble für neue musik zürich”
Michael Heisch and Daniel Mouthon create a musical and scenic course during which the regulatory systems of music/art and boxing/sport clash, each with their specific physicality, rhythm, and potential.
Punches and fight sequences contrast with tonal fields, arias, songs, and the literary stream of words. Continuities between art, fight, and everyday life are disturbed by moments of displacement and zones of the indefinite:
Who is fighting? Who is playing? Is it a left hook or a pause for breath?
When will the figure tumble – into someone or onto the floor…?
“Shadow Boxing” breaks new ground detaching the run-of-the-mill techniques of boxing and instrumental music from their virtuosity and formulating them anew.
The tried and trusted is ousted from its conventional context and, within hybrid constellations, is tested as to its social potential. Within the scenic arena “Shadow Boxing” examines how boxing and musical competencies fit together, how they fare on common ground, and whether they might even bring over a sense of hitherto unknown techniques and possibilities.
“Shadow Boxing” follows no conventional narrative order, nor does it tell a story proper, and the scene presents no peep-show situation. The classical division of roles – the boxer here and the musician there – is lost as the play unfolds.
Broadly speaking “Shadow Boxing” resembles a tableau vivant – single miniature scenes developing out of the moment, then fading and congealing once again in a new image.
In the most scurrilous moments the performative situations remind us perhaps of Erwin Wurm’s “one-minute-sculptures”, although the musical and scenic action follows no end in itself but a narrative track.
In its reference to the social potential “Shadow Boxing” is a musical-cum-combative hybrid defined by the confrontation with texts by Giorgio Agamben and Robert Walser. They form the backdrop of the scene in which “potential and reality, potency and act become one.”
