On Friday, 16th at 19:00 in Manggha Centre for Japanese Art and Technology contemporary dance collective Harakiri Farmers will present its brand new piece "Stille". The performance mixes movement and live music written by acclaimed composer Aleksandra Gryka and performed by Cztery Czwarte Quartet.
"Stille" investigates the notions of utopia on the physical level. What happens to the human body in highly utopian environment? Can we treat utopia as a virus? These are the main questions addressed in the piece. Four dancers go on a journey through the history of utopian thinking accompanying by the string quartet. During this journey the audience is more and more immersed in the deep waters of sensual sounds and images. What looks like a presentation becomes a challenge. Just like silence, sinister and comforting at the same time. Silence seen not as lack of sounds but eternal peace which we all seek but which is here on earth impossible.
direction: Wojtek Klimczyk
choreography: Dominika Knapik (in collaboration with the dancers)
music: Aleksandra Gryka
performed by: Cztery Czwarte Quartet (Karolina Szymbara, Marta Rychlik, Zuzanna Iwańska, Agnieszka Majchrzyk)
dance: Przemysław Kamiński, Mikołaj Karczewski, Dominika Knapik, Natalia Wilk
dramaturgy: Wojtek Klimczyk, Iga Gańczarczyk
produced by Association for Humanistic Initiatives in Arts Sztruks
co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage
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Admission: 20 pln
On Saturday, 17th at 19:00 in Manggha Centre for Japanese Art and Technology Lawrence Kramer with the help of Krakow-based musicians will present his composition "A Short History (Of the Twentieth Century)" for High Voice and Percussion
The text of A Short History is a list of forty-eight place names, each of which marks a scene of atrocity and mass death. The implication speaks for itself. The history spans the period between the First World War and what the composition takes to be the symbolic end of the century on the slightly belated date of September 11, 2001. Interspersed with the place names are a few brief quotations and a paraphrase from T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land--phrases that in retrospect take on the weight of premonitions: iconic place names, the idea of the city as a utopia gone bad, and the image of falling towers. The sequence of names is roughly chronological; some acts of naming occur out of sequence to mark historical connections or ironies.
High Voice: Joanna Radziszewska
Percussion: Maciej Hałoń, Jacek Dwojak
The performance will include comments from the composer and Q&A with the audience
Lawrence Kramer is Distinguished Professor of Music and English at Fordham University. He is the author of many books, including Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History; Opera and Modern Culture; Why Classical Music Still Matters; Interpreting Music; and Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge. He is also an active composer with numerous performances of vocal and chamber works both in the United States, including Lincoln Center and the campus of the Santa Fe Opera, and Europe, including Vienna, Oxford, and Edinburgh.
Admission: free
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