ICDS6 Opening Ceremony – Performances

ICDS6: Ecologies of practice in music and movement (02 – 05 August 2023, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA).

Content:
0:00 – 01:45 – Intro Stephen Neely
01:46 – 16:19 – Dierk Zaiser – “Long rain”
16:20 – 47:26 – 2. The Theater of Rhythm Katalog (The Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice) – Zoom on Eco Boom!

Opening Ceremony started with two performances:

1. Dierk Zaiser – “Long rain”

“The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.”

In his short story “The Long Rain” from 1950, Ray Bradbury opened the dystopic and futuristic scenery with this sensitive description of an epic natural occurrence – a never ending rain. Sun Domes might be the rescue. Dierk Zaiser shows in a one-man-performance the qualities of natural phenomena in sound and movement expressions. With excerpts from the composition “Construction in Space” by Olga Neuwirth, he brings us closer to the changeable power of nature, from gentle beauty to threatening violence.

2. The Theater of Rhythm Katalog (The Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice) – Zoom on Eco Boom!

Scenario, direction, music and performance:
Anetta Pasternak – artistic direction, frame drum, vocal
Wojciech Smołka – guitar, beatbox
Marta Jarzyna – Ewelina Gałysa – violin, vocal
Karolina Paczuła – Karolina Lisowska – ukulele, vocal
Martyna Borowska – oboe, ukulele, vocal
Wiktoria Jańczyk – flute, vocal
Emma Shubin (guest) – flute
Bethan Habron-James (guest) – declamation
Wojciech Laskowski – soundscape
Stefan Raczkowski – graphic score
The performance uses Julia Fiedorczuk’s poetry

A performance inspired by ecology. The problem of reducing sound pollution, postulated long ago by Murray Schafer, the founder of acoustic ecology and the concept of soundscape, is significant to us musicians. Of course, ecology is a duty but also a fashion these days. Are we eco-consumers, and can we defend ourselves against eco manipulation that has become a standard mechanism used in green marketing? In the current crisis, we are forced to make savings. We save energy, but we also meticulously plan our daily activities to achieve the desired efficiency. However, do we not experience an overwhelming excess when controlling all this limits? As teachers and educators who develop Dalcroze’s vision, we want to contribute to shaping pro-ecological attitudes, and therefore we are looking for ideas within our own practice. Alternatively, leaving our comfortable and heated class with piano and going to nature would be a desirable eco practice. These and other situations may happen in the newest artistic production of Theater of Rhythm Katalog, entitled Zoom on Eco Boom.

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