A song cycle by Maarten Seghers
For Maarten Seghers, creating work and meaning from ‘unintelligibility’ is a deliberate act in which the hopeful slumbers. A new notion can emerge. Thus disconnection is a potential re-connection.
Songs of Disconnection is a next step in Seghers’ research into the potentially tragic relationship between entertainer and spectator. This resides in the irresistible urge to share and connect and the essential impossibility of doing so.
“Today, beyond all the discoveries, reclamations and exploits, we come to a landscape. It is a landscape that we no longer know. The same landscape that thus becomes the new discovery. The idea of the end is dropped, the need for an alternative world at astronomical distance is dropped. A new potential arises in the same place.
There is an eruption of all colours and meanings because everything could be and nothing is. An exuberant utterance that sprouts from an excited imagination about unattainable places and incomprehensible times. A generator that breeds the absurd idea called ‘together’.”
– Maarten Seghers
Songs of Disconnection unfolds in the unconventional set-up of a surrounding, free audience. Songs of Disconnection is a musical and physical concert – performance.
The concert floor is problematized as a scenographic object by making silence impossible through an unstable surface of corrugated sheets. As a result, the whole scenic situation is a radical sound installation that makes the physical control of the perfomers, but also the feasibility of their concert duties, fundamentally difficult. Presence becomes sound, sound becomes matter, matter becomes intensity, intensity becomes content.
CREDITS
Composition, libretto, direction: Maarten Seghers
By and with Simon Lenski, Aya Suzuki, George van Dam en Michael Schmid
Production management: Marjolein Demey
In collaboration with Ictus ensemble
Realised with the support of the Flemish Government