FALL BACK: ETERNAL RETURNS I: Look here… Where did all of the time go?
FALL BACK: ETERNAL RETURNS I: Look here… Where did all of the time go?
Oct 29, 2022, Saturday, 8 pm, the Kunstkapel
The first program of the Fall Back season begins with a question that ponders the space between what was and what is and our new difficulties in coming to terms with the strange feeling that nothing can be as it was.
The Transpiring Conservatory performs The Seven Minutes
Performed by the Pitfall Ensemble: Pau Sola Masafrets, Gareth Davis, Alkistis Misouli and Jan Willem van der Ham
Connected with the Spring Transpiring Conservatory workshop performances of Aus Den Sieben Tagen by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the Autumn sees the compressed twitterizer version for the future in which seven days is compacted into seven minutes. In this case a series of seven minute solos which in turn take up the new challenge for the conservatory: to create duos with the Khora space of the room itself as an essential instrument.
Reinier van Houdt & Thomas Mohr: Dealing with Time
Through the months of the lockdowns video artist Thomas Mohr and composer/musician Reinier van Houdt explored the relation between moving image and music. Since then they have established different dynamics over three projects with the growing awareness that they were establishing different aspects of time. These multi-layered compositions can begin with the end describing the process from perception to experience, from specific situations to general characteristics, from rough to subtle. Three works now become three movements in an overall arc: Stripes 1988, Habitat 2 and Turning Point. The arc of this piece covers a period of 34 years.
The Pitfall Ensemble performs Writhing, Still 2.0
Performers include: Pau Sola Masafrets, Gareth Davis, Alkistis Misouli and Jan Willem van der Ham
Four performers interpret a score of writhings, connected to previous works performed in the Beatrixpark in connection with the Shadow Floriade. Writhings, Still are a series of scores that attempt to reflect life sentences made up of brain waves, breathing patterns, sleep motion studies… the return to bodily awareness seen against the line of the landscape. These scores mean to capture the return to another sense of time and space and our bodily restlessness within this equation.
FALL BACK: ETERNAL RETURNS October 21—December 12, 2022
The Autumn program of Audio Visual Spatial performances
For the Autumn program The Warp provides the counter balance for the Spring Ahead: The Afterlife program presented earlier this year with Fall Back: Eternal Returns. Just as we are prompted to remember to set the clocks forward by the command to Spring Ahead in the Autumn we know we must always fall back and set the clocks accordingly. For the Warp however, Fall Back means an attempt to return to an apparent new normalcy after the demise of the plans to transform the Kunstkapel into the Conservatory of Amsterdam but also as a reflection of the attempt to readjust after the extended Covid period that began in Spring 2020. With Fall Back: Eternal Returns we explore the recurring aspects that have characterized the work made in the Kunstkapel over the last ten year period.
The concept of the Eternal Return has been with us since Greek Antiquity when the stoics postulated that history was doomed to repeat itself infinitely since the universe and its concomitant energy is recurring. Nietzsche later transforms this into a thought experiment which questions what we would do faced with the information that we could be doomed to repeat ourselves. Nietzsche later had Zarathustra proclaim:
All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if you ever wanted one thing twice, if you ever said, ‘You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!’ then you wanted all back … For all joy wants—eternity.
The actual physical reality of the Kunstkapel which we have treated alternately as an instrument, a vessel, a container, a space station, a space of contemplation, a place of madness and at last a place of recovery, is the site of eternal returns and its circular immersive quality provides the perfect object correlative for this proposition. The Autumn program will consist of the regular Audio Visual Spatial spectrum programs that usually combine three performances in a single evening, several ongoing workshops which will produce individual evenings for stand alone performances as well as club nights that create a different context to present a dynamic environment for more impromptu or informal performances.
