“Transforming Space” - A Performance Series that started in the St. Gertrud Church in Cologne.
The room as a tonal-musical entity is the starting point! The room becomes a musical instrument that is played with predominantly percussive playing techniques. The individual areas of the spatial location become, so to speak, independent sub-instruments, such as different floor areas, window panes, walls, the air and also chairs or stage platforms. When playing these individual 'instruments', I move in space and play not only the musical but also the dance-like 'space'.
The hands, the feet, the whole body is the sound generators with which the room is made to sound. The movement in space becomes a central moment that cannot be separated from the sound event.
Through transdisciplinary collaboration with contemporary dancers, I developed a method of using the space that includes the dance space. In this way, movements can be the starting point for sounds, with the sound being placed on top of the movement.
In 2012, the performance concept "bewegte Musik" was created for the connection of music and dance movements and a little later a performance with dancer Nina Patricia Hähnel, in which I played a huge imaginary percussion set on the stage. My movements served as a starting point for the dance material of the other dancers.
Space as a Resource
The room as a place of diverse spheres fascinates me. It is very immediate and liberating to view your immediate environment as an instrument! One and the same room can take on so many different functions. It is this reinterpretation or ambiguity of spaces that I find fascinating.
The floor can be a musical instrument at one moment, only to be the floor again shortly afterwards, without the claim being explicitly made to sound.
I prefer to play on theater stages, churches, museums, galleries and generally large, over-acoustic areas. But non-art spaces like a kitchen or an office can also be inspirational. I find it exciting to ask to what extent we need instruments, or when and how an object becomes a musical instrument. For me, playing on what is already there, what surrounds me, is a social statement: I am satisfied with what immediately surrounds me, I don't need anything else materially. It is solely the inner decision that turns the moment into a musical-artistic moment.
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