1: SONGS
This performance has been moved to Saturday, November 16, 2019 in Frascati Theater.
1:SONGS is part of Nicole Beutler Collection: a four-day overview and anniversary festival around the work of theatre maker and choreographer Nicole Beutler. Internationaal Theater Amsterdam and Theater Frascati present highlights from ten years of Nicole Beutler Projects. Discover the cross-border performances of this unsurpassed 'visual artist in the theatre'.
Existential exercise for a singing body.
1: SONGS, Nicole Beutler's highly acclaimed piece from 2009, is a solo performance in the form of a concert, a 'Song Journey' or an existential exercise for a singing body. Performer Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti gives her voice to the intense words of tragic female characters from theatrical history, such as Gretchen, Antigone and Medea. The suffering of these (anti-) heroines repeatedly enters her body as she sings, speaks and shouts their words: fragile, raw, calculated and emotional. But who's speaking here? And do the dramatic references from the past resonate in the here and now?
Gary Shepherd's contemporary electronic music and the canon of literary text form the basis for a subtle but loud scream against the instability and calculable incalculability of existence. Director and choreographer Nicole Beutler works with the tension between intense emotionality and cool calculation on the one hand, and creates space for reflection on the history of the theatre on the other. How do we look at emotions, what moves us and what doesn't? And to what extent does the past resonate in contemporary reality?
Nicole Beutler received the VSCD-Mime Award for 1: SONGS in 2010. The performance was also selected by the jury of the Flemish Theatre Festival as one of the ten best performances of the 2009/2010 season and was also performed at the Dutch Theatre Festival 2010. 1: SONGS won the Silver Award for Best Performance (Special Jury Award) at the International Festival of Liberal Theater 2012, in Amman, Jordan.
NBcollection
During NBcollection, the three pieces from Beutler's Bauhaus trilogy will be presented next to each other for the first time. With 5: ECHO (in collaboration with ICK), 6: THE SQUARE and 7: TRIPLE MOON, Beutler brings visual experimentation to the main stage. True Beutler classics like the concert performance 1: SONGS and the symmetrical piece 3: THE GARDEN will be performed, as well. During the festival, a performance from Beutler's early days will be re-premiered: the exact position of things. This short, dark dance performance from 2005 was a decisive turning point the development of Beutler's characteristic signature: the dissecting and rearranging of image, movement, light, music and text into a revealing and poignant Gesamtkunstwerk.
'To Gary Shepherd's contemporary electronic music, Mitrovic whispers, sings, speaks and screams their words, their suffering, into a new story.' - de Volkskrant
'Nicole Beutler masterfully reworks the age-old eros-thanatos theme into her own contemporary language, so that the original setting of the past fades and these women become accessible modern beings'. - Urbanmag.be
'It seemed less that the song was a representation of the character, and more as if she was mediating through Ibelisse. She had me from the first line.' - Juncture.com
Credits
direction and choreography Nicole Beutler
with Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti
music Gary Shepherd
lighting design Minna Tiikkainen
video design Videomachas (Susanna Brenner/Helle Lyshoj)
costume design Jessica Helbach
made possible in part by PACT Zollverein Essen (DE), Frascati Amsterdam, Beursschouwburg Brussel (BE), Fonds Podiumkunsten, Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, XOVER Sound System K Array, Raul Mini.
production Nicole Beutler Projects
