Picture
taken from workshop in Vietnam
IDIOMS
IDIOMS is a piece of experimental music theatre with three actors and
the three musicians in The Six Tones.
The text in the piece is in English, Swedish and Vietnamese and can be
understood as a deconstruction of three classic stories of impossible
love across cultures and social barriers: Marguerite Duras: The Lover,
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and the Vietnamese tale
of My Chau and Trong Thuy. The different traditions that the actors represent
provides a range of expression in a wide span between spoken theatre and
opera. The music, which in a similar way weaves traditional Vietnamese
music together with experimental Western music, is produced by Richard
Karpen in dialogue with the The Six Tones and Josh Parmenter from DXARTS.
The
Sonat Series
SONAT is a series of experimental music-dramatic projects by Teatr Weimar
and Ensemble Ars Nova. The point of departure is the form and aesthetics
of the hörspiel transformed into scenic formation. The hörspiel
has it’s strongest traditions in Germany and is the German term
for radio drama. It is in other words one of the most recent dramatic
and musical forms, directly linked to a technical achieve-ment that still
today has an important role in our culture; the radio. The hörspiel
brings together radio documentary, soundscape, acoustic and electroacoustic
music with the semiotics of the theatre. Since 2008, we have cooperated
in order to find new forms for experimental music theatre. The core of
this activity is the production of new works, merging the aesthetics of
the hörspiel with the theatre’s modes of expressions. So far,
we have produced seven works, five of these were world premieres and two
had their first Swedish performances. Our overarching ambition is to build
an artistic competence and methodology for finding new forms of expressions
for musical drama. An important part of this project is to create a European
network of scenes for new and experimental musical drama.
Transitions
IDIOMS brings the collaboration between Teatr Weimar and Ars Nova in connection
with Transitions, a project launched by Ensemble Ars Nova in 2006. Transitions
wishes to enable contemporary art music to face the challenge of the multicultural
society of today by means of creating meeting points where sound artists,
composers and performers from any possible cultural background can come
together in a context of mutual learning. Central issues to the project
are aspects of cultural identity and heritage and how these can be kept
alive and brought into creative use in the Western multicultural situation.
An important figure of thought is how the transmission of a tradition
always involves an element of transformation. One may say that it is this
transformation that is in focus, in the artistic projects as well as in
the research.
Read more about Transitions
Production
facts
Composer: Richard Karpen
Text + Director: Jörgen Dahlqvist
Musicians: Stefan Östersjö (guitars and other
stringed instruments), Nguyen Thanh Thuy (Dan Tranh) and Ngo Tra My (Dan
Bau)
Actors:
There will be three actors, one from Sweden, one from Vietnam and one
from the US.
Programming: Josh Parmenter
Costume,
set design and light: Johan Bergman and Jenny Ljungberg
Read
more
Participants
Participating
organizations
Working methods
Media
Video documentation
from the workshop in Hanoi, oct 2010
Audio sample from the workshop in Seattle,
may 2010
Links