The virtuoso concert pianist AyseDeniz performs hers and Thierry Zaboitzeffs compositions at the grand piano in in her peculiar, idiosyncratic way, inspired by Chopin and Rachmaninoff. Four dancers - bodies in concert - enter the stage, creating a physical dialogue with AyseDeniz's performance, thus embodying and externalising the interior sounds and texture of the music.
Lemur-like creatures, distorted, constricted and oppressed, invade the concert pianist’s perfectly harmonic world. As if even the artificially encapsulated high culture, where the pursuit of perfection often doesn’t leave any room for doubts, could not escape from human thoughts and every day’s worries.
Nightmarish realities and fears, but also a foreshadow of the desire for free moving appear as incarnated thoughts and feelings.
Fantastical lemur-like creatures - distorted, constricted and oppressed - invade the concert pianist’s perfect harmonic world, so that even the artificially encapsulated world of high culture, where the pursuit of perfection doesn’t leave any room for doubts, cannot escape from the tension of everyday cares and worries. Nightmarish realities and fears, but also a shadow of the desire for freedom, appear as incarnated thoughts and feelings.
The five dancers’ moving bodies - sometimes individually, sometimes in pairs, sometimes a seemingly inextricable agglomeration of extremities - constitute and articulate the physicality and motivations of strange, otherworldly creatures. Are they the pianist’s alter egos or dark suppressed aspects of her soul? While she is playing, these beings become her fellow antagonists and collaborators. They are suffused by the dense, mighty live music and then are driven or tortured, hunted or released, by the sounds around them. They resist – and they react.
What was the inspiration for this performance?
Very simple: I heard the pianist in the frame of a music-festival in Portugal and had images of a dance-piece happing around a grand piano, representing somehow the inner world of the pianist. Creatures enter her bubble, her closed world of classical music and cause some disorder ...
How did you go about gathering the team for it?
I work with the composer Thierry Zaboitzeff and the dancers since many years - so I had just to convince AyseDeniz. And she was curious enough to dare the adventure.
How did you become interested in making performance?
I guess, something pushes me since I can stand on my legs, means, since my childhood.
Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
Yes. I always work with improvisation as starting point. But for CLOSE UP we had a special magic experience: After three days only we did an improvisation of 45 minutes, guided by me from outside, and not only the dancers improvised, but also AyseDeniz on themes of Thierry Zaboitzeff. This is very rare for a classical pianist.
What do you hope that the audience will experience?
To get connected with own feelings, own memories, own phantasies, own ideas - triggered by our performance.Are there any other questions that might help me to understand the meaning of dramaturgy for you in your work?
Just let yourself go
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