Helmi Vent - DanceMusicTheatre-Projects

The project began in the academic year 1996/1997 in several theoretical and practical "corners" of everyday study life at the Hochschule Mozarteum: a block seminar on "Concepts and Designs for Space – Sound – Body in the 20th Century"; a first follow-up project on performance modes of a sound-and-body theater in basement and lavatory spaces, halls and staircases; a second project with short music and dance theater compositions on wooden, glass and metal doors, ventilation casings, pipes etc., often in connection with the playing of musical instruments, which was then audio-visually documented and subjected to alienation processes. A further impetus for the "Songs of(f) Stage" occurred as a result of our exploration of Mauricio Kagel’s "Instrumental Theater", continuing on into the current course entitled "Mauricio Kagel – Music, Movement, Theater, Film".

Of the many figures who have put sounds and spaces in motion in the course of the 20th century, we ultimately got "hung up" on Mauricio Kagel – in more than one sense of the word: in the course of the project work, we looked at a lot of things in an inverted position and thereby gained new perspectives of viewing, listening and understanding. First of all, we struggled with Kagel’s chamber music piece "Sur Scène" of 1959, then amused and amazed ourselves with the caricaturing absurdities of "Repertoire" from "Staatstheater" (1971), read up on and discussed reception history material, and finally went as far as to explore aesthetic fields of reflection up to and including Kagel’s ambiguous (or unambiguous) "Nah und Fern" worlds of 1995. His reading piece "Composition und Decomposition" served as an important impulse for a foray through post-modern philosophical positions, always accompanied by the issue of the aesthetic criteria of our decade. Many of the questions we investigated remained open.

"Songs of(f) Stage" is an interim result of an attempt to engage in conversation with the mainly hidden performing spaces of a theater, using the means they provide. The off-stage area assumes a leading role in the entire piece and whenever it looks likes the roles are going to shift, it quickly resumes its auditory and visual prominence through wandering images and sounds.

‘It is very difficult to pin down influences, especially in the "heterophony" (Kagel 1961) of one’s own development. One thing is definite: the piece would not have happened without Kagel’s "Improvisation ajoutée", in an overall sense. Between ajouter and redonner:
"Songs of(f) Stage" – Dedicated to Mauricio Kagel.