Transit

The Bartók Saal can hold 1100 people. The decision to dispense with conventional seating allowed an engagement with the relationship between the individual and the mass. Within the work’s spatial constellation, which takes up the hall’s aspecific potential, the audience is moved about as a mass, not according to individual wishes. The restriction of each individual guest’s freedom constitutes a challenge and an imposition. Between the pieces, all performers change their locations. Laurent Chétouane, together with Stefan Griesshaber and Sanna Dembowski, conceived the respective performance constellations and geared them towards collective movements with the audience between the different musics.

In addition to presenting premieres of three pieces, Transit is thus also the premiere of a concert format. The view that music acts in a disorienting and three-dimension manner, treating places and bodies as fluid entities, leads to an interest in stage forms that go beyond a frontal performance situation. The multi-directional concert practice aimed for understands the complex community of audience and musicians as an event of togetherness. From the first moment, the ticket check at the door, questions are raised: what and whom do we expect? What awaits us?

The concern in Transit is to interrogate space, music and movement as threshold phenomena that enable spaces of thought to ensue. In opening up the ritualized concert form, Kaleidoskop asks itself and the audience a question: how is it possible for what can human beings, as individual controllers of a territory, to enter a self-perception of, and reflection on, physically spatial processes within a listening community? Thus the spatial experience reveals itself not least as a reflection on the coexistence of humans.