Navigations

Composition for weather machines by Arturas Bumšteinas

Friday 19 September, at 16:00–16:45

130–300 kr

35 % off with ultiMATE

Forget loudspeakers and electricity: here, sound is made with wood, rope, and wind wheels, inspired by age-old techniques for conjuring storms on stage.

This is the tradition Lithuanian composer Arturas Bumšteinas listens to in Navigations. Invited to create a piece inspired by Luigi Russolo’s futuristic intonarumori (noise intoning machines) Bumšteinas tuned his ears to the past.

While Russolo in the early 1910s built buzzing, grinding and erupting instruments to pioneer industrial music, ancient Greek and Baroque theatres had already fashioned their own orchestras of noise with wind, rain and thunder simulators to stir the skies of staged drama.

Bumšteinas travelled through historical theatres across Europe, tracing the remnants of these early devices. Together with theatre carpenter Ernestas Volodzka, he reconstructed machines for simulating wind, rain and thunder.

In Navigations (2019–ongoing), an ensemble of five performers activates these weather-machines across an empty space. The paths of tropical cyclones unfold, thunder strikes wood, and seeds drift across the sea, carried by wind and rain.

The way weather was once heard—or imagined—now strikes our contemporary ears, marked by a climate in collapse and the thinning breath of a dying nature.

Facts

The audience sits in a circle around the performers and their machines, experiencing sound, movement, and mechanics up close. A special children’s version of the work will be shown during the festival (more information in August).
The background for the title Navigations is this: In Baroque theatre, stagehands were often sailors, navigating the stage machinery like a ship.
The composer says on the piece:
I fell in love with theatre noise machines because these things are very simple, yet they animate space, fill it with atmosphere, and they have this ability to create ever-shifting sonic environments that are as difficult to map as the weather itself.