The American sound artist, Douglas Henderson, studied composition and theory at Princeton University under Milton Babbitt, a pioneer of synthesizers and Pulitzer Prize winner, Elie Yarden, and J.K. Randall, co-editor of the magazine, Perspectives of New Music.
Henderson currently resides in Brooklyn and, after receiving a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service in 2007, in Berlin. His artistic work has been supported by renowned foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Foundation of Contemporary Art New York, and numerous other grants; his list of exhibition activities and performances is as noteworthy as it is international. His compositional work has been presented at countless computer and new music festivals ranging from Seoul to New York. He has collaborated intensely with modern dance choreographers, composing for the likes of Jeremy Nelson, David Zambrano, and Meg Stuart, as well as for numerous dance theatres across Europe and the US.

Visible Sound

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Part 2. Playback

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The work of this composer and performer is located somewhere in the scope of multi-channel electro-acoustic composition. However, he is not only concerned with purely acoustic work, rather, he is consistently devoted to making sound visible. He didn’t really want to begin, says the artist, with the common perception of music, and wanted to be less concerned with how music sounds than how it looks. This does not mean that the acoustic intensity would be negligible, but rather that it would serve as a reference that determines which approach his compositional work takes. His recording, “Icebreaker”, performed at the Hudson Opera House, awakes paranoid feelings in the listener, who feels as if a sheet of ice is cracking underneath his/her own feet and shattering into a million tiny bits. His loudspeakers, painted in swimming-pool blue and filled with water, lean once again in a more visual direction. Henderson compares this 2003 piece with abstract painting, and as a composer, he considers it representative of a large part of his work.

Lately, the artist has also turned his attention to constructing instruments in the form of space installations. Strings are stretched across the spaces and entire building structures are utilized as bodies of sound. They are activated by machines and challenge the movements of the visitors, who come to realize that they are triggering what they are hearing with their own bodies. (wh/jn)

In Heinrich Kleist’s essay, “On the Marionettentheater”, a discussion takes place between a layman and the principal dancer of the city opera. The layman, impressed by the presentation, wants to know what kind of technical mechanism has made it possible for the puppets to dance so convincingly that it seems as though dance itself has been shown in its most perfect form. The dance professional considers this for a moment, then gives an answer: When we see a “perfect” dance presentation and ask how it was done, then we’re already missing the point. It does not depend on the mechanics, nor on the perfected techniques with which the individual limbs of the puppets are handled with the most precision.

If one wants to understand why a dance appears “perfect”, it is much more effective not to focus so much on the technical perfection, but rather on the mechanisms of the representation of the dance. If these mechanisms are perfect, then the viewer who sees a movement corresponding to the represented one has to call this movement “dance”. And vice versa, when he sees movements which do not correspond to this representation of dance, even if they are also superbly performed, he does not even consider them to be dance. In short: What we perceive as dance is what corresponds to its representation.

In their workshop, “Sweat -The Movie“, Tor Lindstrand and Marten Spangberg of International Festival together with the participants take on this topic of the representation of the dance. Contemporary dance is very different and much more than what is shown to us on stage. Contemporary dance is not limited to the isolated movements which are demonstrated to us in video clips and Hollywood movies. But contemporary dance is influenced and rarely separated from such representations of dance. What is dance when the medium of its representation shifts? What is dance?

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Lindstrand and Spangberg conceived of a workshop setting in which the participants – all professional dancers – not only reflect on typical representations of dance, either by approaching them or distancing themselves from them, but also investigate cinematic possibilities of the representation of dance and thereby contribute to the definition of dance. “Sweat - The Movie”, according to Lindstrand, is “a workshop about the production of a dance film and a dance film about this workshop, which took place as part of the Impulstanz Festival in Vienna”. Each participant took part in discussing, training, choreography, building and designing film sets, directing, shooting, and editing. The production took place over 30 days, ending with its premiere on the 31st day, August 8th 2008 at Kasino am Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna.

The job description for Marten Spangberg encompasses many terms. He got his start as a dance critic, writes on theory, is active as a performer, dance dramaturge, a curator, and a choreographer, and is considered a stage producer in quite a positive sense. Spangberg has been collaborating with the Swedish architect, Lindstrand Tor, since 2004 under the name International Festival. Their collaborative work explores perceptions of concepts related to body and space, and has gained international attention. At the present and in the last year, they have been invited to the European Arts Center in Cologne, the PERFORMA 07 in New York, and the Steirischen Herbst 07. For the festival in Graz, they developed “The Theater”, a multi-faceted enterprise which simultaneously describes a venue for stories, characters, and illusions, the performances that take place there, and the actual spatially-adaptable theater that was constructed from freight containers.

Aside from his collaboration with Lindstrand Tor, Marten Spangberg also works as a solo artist. He experiments in performances with himself and with others. The tools of his work are the body in relation to the world and the way the body behaves in space. He is concerned with the different behavior patterns we embody: our self, our reality, our sociability, our wants…

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We interviewed Spangberg in the context of the event series, “NICHTS ist aufregend. NICHTS ist sexy. NICHTS ist nicht peinlich.” (“NOTHING is exciting. NOTHING is sexy. NOTHING is not awkward.”), being held at MOMUK and Tanzquartier Wien. His performance in the series, “Slow Fall”, is a sketch, an artistic draft of a work which will premiere in November 2008. In the context of this performance, Spangberg explores the different behavior patterns which we embody and moderate, and the possibility thereby of creating a new understanding for ourselves.

Spangberg takes on the statement “NOTHING is not awkward” and tries to find a term for awkwardness which corresponds to the artistic emphasis of his work on the relationships of the body to area and the body to the world. By positing awkwardness as a displacement, as a deliberate ill-at-ease, as a levitation, our embodiments of our interactions become free-floating, thereby allowing us to grab hold of how they interact with us. For the choreographic realization of this program, Spangberg borrowed from elements of eastern spiritual out-of-body experience techniques, but denies his audience the exhibition of a performance for which they would already have words. By rupturing the typical ways in which we embody physical propriety, Spangberg brings about a displacement through which, during the performance, his nakedness, which has not yet been articulated, is experienced by the audience under the new guise, and in the best sense, as an “ill-at-ease” experience. The audience cannot find the words, for words have in fact become disproportionate, to describe the experience. However, afterwards, somehow a little space is created, to separately determine one’s own proportions, and to use this experience of awkwardness to find one’s own words and to take up one’s own position. (wh/jn)

She produces films every year. She stands before the camera. She directs—in recent years, together with Chris Haring. It was a blessing that she met Chris Haring, explains Mara Mattuschka. He is generous. He has an open system of working that integrates people and their respective points of view. Haring stages his productions in bare spaces, from which Mattuschka makes films which correspond to cinematic rules of setting and dramaturgy. She extends her perspective as a painter into her cinematic approach. Up-close views of the body, from below, from above. Views which distort perspective. With digital retouching, she designs places, architectures, and spatialities. The films resulting from their collaboration are called: “Legal Errorist”, “Part Time Heroes”, and “Running Sushi”. A fourth is to come.
She refers to her earlier cinematic work as “psychological mini-dramas”. Their contents move between the borders of tragedy and comedy. She appears in them as a performance artist. She plays Madame Ping Pong, Mimi Minus, Mahatma Gobi, and Ramses II. Their identities are somewhat loose, at play, they only become clearer in self-expression. In play, one develops a certain relaxedness towards oneself and towards problems in everyday life. This is probably what Otto Mühl was aiming at, in principle.

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Mara Mattuschka makes films, plays, sings, paints. Bulgarians, she says, have a tendency to do everything. Mara Mattuschka comes from Bulgaria. She studied painting and animation with Maria Lassnig. She boasts a wide variety of artistic styles. Her work lives to the fullest, her characters are usually naked and psychologically open-hearted. Truth has many sides. She refers to herself as a post-post modernist – she likes to play, but also somehow addresses truth.
In the twenty first century, the need to experiment and break rules is over. There is a new renaissance, a return to humanity, for whom a discussion about gender roles has actually already begun. This new renaissance could be wonderful, as she hates the word “creativity”. Her work is extremely versatile, and she is so full of energy. She takes breaks between works in café houses—a truly Viennese tradition during which she takes a breather from the (Kasachok) dance of life. (wh/jn)