Kaunas Avalanche (confluence) and Bow Exercises

GEORG NUSSBAUMER (Austria)

Ilgoji salė

Saturday, June 3rd, 2023

Work for 6 performers with pebbles, boulders, bushes, a bell, a cello and a bow

Georg Nussbaumer – a composer and a performance artist. He is considered a virtuoso Gesamtkunstwerker (the German term Gesamtkunstwerk roughly translates as “complete work of art” and describes a work of art or a creative process in which different forms of art are brought together to create one coherent whole). His work balances between composition, installation art, performance and theatre. Nussbaumer extends the boundaries of musical instruments to installations, using machines, videos or animals to realise his compositions. There is hardly anything that Georg Nussbaumer does not use for music, and his instruments can be a bow, antlers, a urinal, stones, potatoes and chewing gum. Nussbaumer works with professional performers, ensembles and musicians, as well as with archers, a motorcycle club or hundreds of amateur village choirs. His large-scale works have been performed on international stages.

The first part, “Kaunas Avalanche”, is a piece about the incessant downward movement of stones and the rolling from the mountains to the sea. The phenomenon of migrating rocks as a horizontal avalanche is explored with microscopic precision in the study of image and sound. This natural process, rarely heard in nature, is interspersed with the rustling of coastal vegetation. A bell and a cello, shaped like a man bathing on the shore, represent the passage of time at different speeds.

The second movement, Bow Exercises (Wounds and Echoes), is a work for bow and cello.

“Bow Exercises expresses the relationship between a weapon and a musical instrument. The archer copies the music of St. John of God of the 6th century. The archer is a copy of St Sebastian’s images of a cello body resembling a human torso. The tension of the first shot is accompanied by a series of unrestrained violence. The arrows match those of the painting on the same body and transform into the arrows of St. Each wound echoes the tone of a cello on an intact instrument.

Running time: 120 min plus an interval
Audience age recommendation: +14 years.
The first part will be in the Long Hall and the second part will be performed on the Main Stage