Ondřej Adámek / Rino Murakami - Reaching out

This new work is based on the 2019 composition Man Time Stone Time, in which Adámek chose five poems by the Icelandic author Sjón. In these texts, Sjón speaks of the powers and archaic “energies” of different stones and evokes different relationships between people and stones.

The sound of the ensemble, the voices and bodies of the musicians and the dancers, plays with the characters and the nature of the stones. The stones are also used as objects in the piece. Through sounds, gestures, clusters, or glissandi, they become sand, a pearl, precious gems, the shining moon, a mob on the verge of throwing stones, stones that fly and kill, and the stones that play with us. The ground is hammered to sound out, as deeply as possible, the heart of each thing. Sjón describes the moon as that stone which is inaccessible to mankind.

The soloists’ movements (through the handling of objects) bring new dimension to the performance. They give the illusion of specific messages, but it is the listener who associates those messages with each of the visual and acoustic gestures.

“Caution! SALMON CROSSING!” An amusing phenomenon can be seen every fall in Mason County, Washington (USA): heavy rains make the Skokomish River burst its banks and flood the surrounding roads, which chum salmon swim across to return to their home streams. Biologists suspect that the fishes follow their instinct to find shortcuts. However, crossing the roads in shallow water requires a lot of energy; many salmon are unable to find their way back to the main channel and die.

Taking this phenomenon as a starting point, Murakami developed a piece in which voices, song, percussion, and the performers’ movements describe the sound of the flowing river, the splashing water and swerving cars, before expressing the “voices without voices” of the fish, the sound of their breathing when they swim with all their strength, their gasping, their fear of death. Using traits from musical theater, Murakami interprets the salmons’ desire to return to their home and explores their distinct need to live, surpassing obstacles thanks to their vitality and strength.

In Schlafen gut. Warm., Adámek uses as material letters and postcards secretly sent from the concentration camp of Theresienstadt and postcards written by his great grandmother shortly before her death in Auschwitz.

The singers become an orchestra while the percussionists broaden the possibilities of the singing body: all becomes entangled – the singers use air pumps; the percussionists take part in creating song. In this piece, the boundaries between different forms of vocal expression are increasingly blurred, as are the functions of the singers, the instrumentalists, the dancers, and the conductor. Adámek’s explorations focus on a symbiosis between the phonetics of the text and the sounds of the percussion instruments, and they experiment with different, contrasting uses of the voice (whispering, spoken word, breathing sounds, different kinds of singing, etc.). He also focuses on the electronic amplification of the voices and the sounds they produce.

This new version of the work is a development based on the experiences of the first version. As well as a reduced the percussion part, it includes two dancers who, as visual and sound interpreters, condense and prolong the energy and the vocal and bodily gestures of the musicians and the conductor.