Meyers & Sehgal

Symphony X

Sat 28 April | 21:00 - 22:30 hrs | Stadsschouwburg Utrecht

Buy your ticket for Sat 28 april

For this Springdance premiere Meyers will perform his most ambitious work so far featuring the 16-member REDUX ORCHESTRA in an evolving space designed by Tino Sehgal. Symphony X is a love letter to neo minimal no-wave music, a style that came into being in New York City in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. In this very physical work, compositional procedures influenced by composers such as Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham meet elements from post punk, minimalism and contemporary music. Musical situations at a steady 120bpm are exposed to a permanent web of construction and deconstruction, leading the audience’s expectations astray. The German newspaper ‘Die Zeit’ called it “a completely new music that doesn't even have a name yet.” The composer and musician JG Thirwell aka Foetus describes the work this way: “a vividly evolving, involving minimalist meditation that is propelled by a rock backbeat. It pummels thru a dizzyingly unrelenting series of progressions, existing somewhere at an intersection of Branca, Glass, and Love Of Life Orchestra.”


While symphonic music has changed drastically over the course of the last 250 years, the formats of its presentation, the concert, basically has not. Tino Sehgal, an artist who has redefined the format of the exhibition, will create a spatial and temporal framework for the symphony, which will be as ever-changing as the music itself and can be described as a ‘choreographed space’.

Listen to a sample of Symphony X here: SYMPHONY X excerpt.mp3
More samples you can find here: http://www.aribenjaminmeyers.com/selected-projects/SYMPHONY-X.html

BIO 

Born in New York and now based in Berlin the composer Ari Benjamin Meyers shifts flexibly between the contexts of cultural production. The range of his activities is evidenced by his many collaborations including with the artists Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Saadane Afif, and Anri Sala, the bands Einstürzende Neubauten, The Orb, and The Residents, the interdisciplinary architecture team raumlabor.berlin, the DJ Ricardo Villalobos, and the electronic pioneer Morton Subotnik, as well as  the Semperoper Dresden and the Staatskapelle Berlin. He is the founder of Soundfair and initiated the now legendary Club Redux – a platform in which he explored the pairing of contemporary music with dance and electronic music in a series of club nights in Berlin between 2004-2006. The 16-piece Redux Orchestra is the ensemble that grew out of these concerts.

Tino Sehgal studied dance and political economy. His works are live situations that can be encountered during the entire opening hours of galleries and museums. These constructed situations can develop differently depending on the comportment of the visitor, thereby integrating an element of participation into the works own structure. In 2005 he represented Germany at the German Pavillon in Venice, in 2010 he had a a solo show at the Guggenheim museum in New York, among others his works are in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, the Tate (Britain) and Moma.(the Museum of Modern Art in New York).