On May 22, 2014, the Zafraan Ensemble can be seen together with the composer Martin Hiendl and the soprano Dénise Beck from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. in the performance installation “Schichtung” at Münsterplatz Basel.
Four performers create barely audible sounds with their bodies: through their breath, their hands, their voices. There is no score but a book with written instructions that they slowly move through as the performance progresses. The extremely fragile sounds are recorded with cassette recorders and passed around in a circle via loudspeakers. Over the course of the hours, these sounds overwrite and mix to form a dense web that preserves and reproduces the performers’ intimate sound traces.
Radical loneliness surrounds the performers – their sounds are (almost) only audible to them. However, with a glass of water, one of the most banal and at the same time most elementary everyday objects, the audience can play the ensemble like a meta-instrument. In order to perceive the result, the audience must break through the loneliness and get close to the performers. “Stratification”, a collaboration between the Zafraan Ensemble and the composer Martin Hiendl, is an invitation to each individual audience member to become a participant in rediscovering the personal boundaries of distance and closeness.
Further information: http://www.reinhoeren.ch
