songscapes and other narratives

The festival ›songscapes and other narratives‹ explores voices, narratives, and melodies that seamlessly bridge the past and the present. Drawing from oral traditions, with their inherent ambiguity, emotional resonance, and contradictions, it forges intuitive connections, evoking memories. ›Songscapes‹ is an invitation to experience a tapestry of forgotten, found, and imagined stories intertwined with songs from specific regions, accompanied by handcrafted instruments and infused with the nostalgic longings of childhood.

The festival's four works by all female artists serve as catalysts for self-reflection, encouraging thoughts about personal histories, differences, commonalities, belonging and the intricate, paradoxical nature of human emotions, motivations, and relationships.

Program

Photo: Dinis Santos

Fri. 03.05.24 20 hSat. 04.05.24 20 h

The performance ›Bocarra‹, which effectively means a very big and open mouth or maw, departs from female singing repertoire from Northern Portugal and Galicia and negotiates experiences of violence, bitterness, and estrangement. Understanding many of these songs as traditions of non-conformity and as veiled and unresolved resistance against heteronormative roles, choreographer and dancer Luísa Saraiva works with movement vocabulary that deals with the continuum between care and violence within physical closeness and the particular vocalic qualities of these musical forms. Bodies are placed discursively and performatively in the voice, and are shaped and transformed by the voices that produce them.

Pictures: Tante Effi, Photo: Elpida Orfanidou

Sat. 04.05.24 15:30 h; 17 hSun. 05.05.24 14 h; 15:30 h; 17 h

›Songtellers‹ is an encounter between a small group of guests and the artist Elpida Orfanidou, which starts with a traditional Greek song. In the stark yet intimate setting of a signal box, formerly used to route and coordinate railway trains at the Zollverein mining complex, memories, movements, stories and dances are meticulously woven in and out of the present moment and create a fleeting symbiosis of closeness and distance, the familiar and unfamiliar, the ordinary and magical, plans and intuition.

Photo: Maximilian Borchardt

Sat. 04.05.24 18 hSun. 05.05.24 18 h

›Do you know this Song?‹ is a piece about loss, sorrow, and the rediscovery of a long-forgotten voice. Through conversations and fragmented memories, Mallika Taneja uncovers the story of a voice hidden between broken dreams and deceptive happiness, a voice that was once deeply loved and close - and yet now forgotten. With a harmonium, microphone, and objects from her childhood, she ventures into the nostalgic land of not-forgetting and invites the audience to accompany her as she searches for the vanished singer and the songs she sang.

Photo: Jakob Gustafsson

Sun. 05.05.24 14:30 – 17:30 h (Durational Performance)

›Sound A Rose In‹ by Alma Söderberg, is a unique open air sound performance inspired by her previous work ›Entangled Phrases‹, which premiered at PACT in 2019. Three performers, three chairs, and three hours of mesmerizing rhythms. Experience a poetic exploration of friendship and resistance, where words are delicately broken down into syllables and rhythms overlap into a polyrhythmic interplay. The audience is free to come and go at any time.