MaerzMusik: New Polyphonies

Vocal performance

Spanning ten days and ten venues in Berlin, with the silent green Kulturquartier as its festival centre, Berliner Festspiele’s MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues 2022 (18 to 27 March)  focuses on the visible and invisible relations that hold everything together, in music and beyond. How can relationality be rethought, redrawn and artistically experimented with?

In newpolyphonies (2021) four singers of HYOID join forces with 15 Berlin-based performers in a curious High Mass about little differences with big impact.

Manyfold, meditative, monstrous, machinic, messianic, mimetic, mesmerising, minuscule, mighty, methodical, momentary, mystical.

Inspired by insects, climate marches and airplane traffic coming to a halt, the leitmotif in this concert-performance is not the loud collective chant, but the experience that each individual – like a link in a chain – can set a vortex of sounds in motion.

newpolyphonies addresses the question of the democratisation of polyphonic art and its social implications. Developed with the Belgian vocal ensemble HYOID, the composition was created in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when the voice is suspect. Integrating the mouth mask as a performative instrument, newpolyphonies dialogues with the dystopian era through a play on vocal proximity and distance, and through the breaking down of barriers between stage and audience. Oscillating between lethargy and healing, newpolyphonies is an abstract allegory of a society that loses itself to find itself again.

newpolyphonies (2021) is a part of Myriam Van Imschoot’s trilogy, What nature says? (2015) and her upcoming work Nocturnes pour une société (2023).

Myriam Van Imschoot: concept, composition, direction

HYOID voices co-creation and performance:
Fabienne Seveillac, Andreas Halling, Els Mondelaers, Gunther Vandeven

Fabrice Moinet: concept, sound design of electronics
Wannes Gonissen: sound engineer
Matthieu Virot: electronics assistant
Lukas Van Haesbroeck: lighting design
Nadine Van Imschoot, Filip Eyckmans: advice layout, costume design

Hiros: producer
La Muse en Circuit: delegated producer
Muziekcentrum De Bijloke, Kunstenwerkplaats, Kunstencentrum BUDA (Kortrijk): co-production

Co-curated by Kamila Metwaly and Berno Odo Polzer, MaerzMusik 2022 presents a programme featuring artists and guests such as Éliane Radigue, Benjamin Patterson, Catherine Lamb, Klangforum Wien, ONCEIM and many others.

More information here.

Tuesday, March 22
Betonhalle
Time slot 1: 8pm – 9pm
Time slot 2: 10pm – 11pm
Tickets: 15€ / reduced 12€
Information on tickets here