In An Evening with, Alex Franz Zehetbauer transports us to a surreal piano bar: a singer at the piano and his repertoire punctuate the gathering of guests. Ear-worm melodies and a trickster humor keep the audience teetering between the earnest and the absurd. Traversing different moods and registers, from poetic lullaby to folk song to pop rendition, An Evening with investigates the multiple roles of songs and their cultural impacts. A certain enchantment occupies the evening as Alex creates a closeness at once strange and familiar, stretching the song into various choreographic postures.
PREMIERE: November 15th (further shows 16th, 17th, 18th) at brut Nordwest.
DATES:
2023
The Brick Theater (Brooklyn, NY) Fjk3 - Contemporary Art Space / CLUB LIAISON (Vienna, Austria) brut Wien / Wien Modern Festival - PREMIERE - (Vienna, Austria) Les Urbaines Festival (Lausanne, Switzerland) FFT Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf, Germany)
2024
Gessnerallee Zürich (Zürich, Switzerland) - April 5th/6th Schwankhalle Bremen (Bremen, Germany) - June 22nd Warehouse9 - Queerlands (Copenhagen, Denmark) - August 16th Gwangju Biennale, Austrian Pavilion (Gwangju, South Korea) - Sept 5th/8th The Sound of C Festival / C-MINE (Genk, Belgium) - Sept. 21st Vienna Art Week 20th Edition / Opening (Vienna, Austria) - Nov 8th
Concept, Songs, Choreography, and Performance Alex Franz Zehetbauer Lyric Collaboration Jen Rosenblit, Dez Miller Dramaturgical Advice Jen Rosenblit Outside Ear & Recoding Christian Schröder Performance Doula Claire Lefevre Piano Mentor Han-Gyeol Lie Outside Eye Liv Schellander Documentation Ipek Hamzaoglu Production management Eva Holzinger / mollusca productions
A co-production of Verein Wilhelmina and Freischwimmen Network
In collaboration with Wien Modern
With the generous support of the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Kunstraum Eindorf, The Brick Theater, ACT OUT, a project of IG Freie Theaterarbeit, funded by BMEIA, and FREISCHWIMMEN, the production platform for performance and theater, supported by brut Wien, FFT Düsseldorf, Gessnerallee Zürich, HochX Theater and Live Art München, LOFFT - DAS THEATER Leipzig, Schwankhalle Bremen, SOPHIENSÆLE Berlin and Theater Rampe Stuttgart, officially operated by SOPHIENSÆLE GmbH, made possible within the framework of the program "Promoting Connections" of the Federal Association of Independent Performing Arts and supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
hearing the wild heart is a sounding ecology. A playfully repurposed wasteland. A sonic world in a constant state of becoming, unfinished and always on the move. An unpredictable mixture of joyous brutality and gentle chaos. A wetland, a swamp, or just a pile of trash.
concept, sonic choreography, performance Alex Franz Zehetbauer choreographic cooperation, performance Gergő D. Farkas musician, sonic engineering Christian Schröder costume Ju Aichinger, Alex Franz Zehetbauer dance carpet painting Ju Aichinger outside eyes & ears Alix Eynaudi, Samuel Schaab light design Sveta Schwin production management mollusca productions
A co-production of Verein Wilhelmina & brut Wien
With the kind support of the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs, nadalokal, and Bears in the Park.
Brunnentroll is a watery pathway of sonic interventions in a city’s public fountains.
Concept, & Performance Alex Franz Zehetbauer Musician Christian Schröder Artistic & Dramaturgical Advice Stina Fors Production Management mollusca productions Graphics & Video Claudia Lomoschitz
A Production by Verein Wilhelmina
Powered by KÖR Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Wien, Stadt Wien, BMKÖS
Thanks to Wiener Wasser
Beginning with an interest in spirals, AyH is a sonic experiment guided by the work and methods of the painter and mystic Hilma af Klint. It is a danced concert of acoustic paintings composed by several non-human musicians in collaboration with Alex Franz Zehetbauer and Christian Schröder. Together they generate visualizations of sound that diagram polyphony as a concept that is both ethereal and tangible. Between seemingly disparate elements a language is forming, both clear and indecipherable, like something you already know—or something ancient.
A basin of water envelopes sound and breath, a portal from which sono-aquatic figures emerge. A hydrophone excavates the inside of a mouth, amplifying the sucking wet swamp therein. A contra bass – dignified, resonates as a living shape in the room. Vibrating cock-rings hang from strings that pierce the room. A group of human and non-human musicians are painting in brush strokes of tone, sonic symbol, rhythm, breath and code-like melody.
The transformation process from audible to visible is inspired by Hilma af Klints work as a mystic and painter. She was a member of “The Five“, a group of women who met regularly to hold seances to communicate with divine entities. They documented their encounters with the divine through automatic drawings and a detailed cataloguing of the information they received. This resulted in a growing “language” of symbols, figures, shapes, and code-like letter groupings. The title of this concert performance comes from this language: “AyH”, which means “to find”.
Concept & Choreography Alex Franz Zehetbauer Composition & Performance Alex Franz Zehetbauer and Christian Schröder Outside Eye Stina Fors Camera Claudia Lomoschitz & Moritz Franz Video Claudia Lomoschitz Production mollusca productions
A co-production between Verein Wilhelmina and brut Wien With the generous support of apap – performing europe, Huggy Bears, Szene Salzburg, Tanzfabrik Berlin, and im_Flieger
photos: © Claudia Lomoschitz, © Moritz Franz, & © Franzi Kreis
Wet dreaming at 52Hz guides us under the surface into an audio-visual ocean of whale intelligence. In his performance, Alex Franz Zehetbauer examines the complex emotional and auditory consciousness of whales and translates their ancient form of long-distance communication into the performance space. Submerged in a large tank, Alex composes live vocals in the form of sonic holograms that break at the audience’s feet in spiralic waves. wet dreaming at 52Hz confronts anthropocentric and patriarchal ideas of intelligence through the embodiment of a whale’s way of experiencing the world.
Whales have been around for a long time. Their brains have had more time to evolve than ours and this evolution has occurred in an environment with few natural predators. Perhaps, because of this, whale’s intelligence is focused on the complexities of interpersonal relationships, emotional honesty, free eroticism, serene playfulness and an agile entry into states we might call psychedelic.
Wet dreaming at 52Hz translates the science of the whale experience into the abstract. With this performance, Alex searches for what it would mean to have the mind of a whale or to perform in a room full of whale-minded people. How does it feel to perceive sound as a material entity? What would it be like if we could all see each others internal body state through sonar? And above all: What might the world look like if we were all a little more cetacean?
Concept & Performance Alex Franz Zehetbauer Artistic Advice & Support Claire Lefèvre Outside Eye Veza Fernández Light David Lang Production Sophie Schmeiser & Eva Holzinger
A coproduction of Brut Wien and Alex Franz Zehetbauer
With the kind support of the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs, ImPulsTanz — Vienna International Dance Festival and Arbeitsplatz Wien Special thanks to Evening Hours NY, INK Initiative, Robyn/Hugo Le Brigand, Wilhelmina Zehetbauer, Alex Siebenstern, Sandra Morell, and Martín Minghetti
*Premiere March 2019 at Imagetanz Festival (Brut Wien)
**work-in-progress showing at Raw Matters, Wien (2018) and Evening Hours, NYC (2018)
wet dreaming at 52Hz (TRAILER)
