Projects – Skills – Performance-Duo & Band aus Berlin

Arien aus Stein

Camilla Milena Fehér — Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:16:34 +0000

ARIEN AUS STEIN is a concert with stories dedicated to a public space by musician and choreographer duo SKILLS. They are asking what meanings niches, corners or gaps have in the midst of increasing gentrification and what effects privatisation and commercialisation have on public space? With their new work SKILLS create a performative monument to St. Pauli’s Balduin Staircase: a kaleidoscope of sounds and voices. They transform interviews with users and neighbours into songs and tracks that ask what dangers this place actually holds and what the decades of conflicts around the stairs are actually about.

Enthusiasm

Camilla Milena Fehér — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 12:59:54 +0000

Concerts are work. Enthusiastically, SKILLS work for SPLITTER ORCHESTER. SPLITTER ORCHESTER enthusiastically works for SKILLS. The result is phantom power for a peculiar space. At silent green’s Betonhalle, a musical machine is kept in motion by the collective spirit of enthusiasm. Before silent green became a venue, a robot used to run on tracks through a library of dead bodies just where the installation is performed today. The robot arranged and moved the archived dead between forensics, mourning hall, crematorium. This is the place where the orchestra transforms into a factory, producing nothing but music.

The space invites us to reflect. What is it that we actually do? What is it that we do in our lives? What do we do? »Enthusiasm« is a musical reflection on the role of work in our lives, on excitement, on being driven and on being busy, on fordistic leftovers in our thoughts and bodies, on vanity and efficiency. Somewhere between routine and ritualistic ecstasy, instruments are being operated, something is being constructed. SKILLS and SPLITTER ORCHESTER develop a choreographed concert, unfolding a space of thinking for the ears in front of the audience’s very eyes.

The title is derived from Dziga Vertov’s movie »Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbass« (1930). The avant-garde editing of the factory scenes in the picture have been read as an early anticipation of techno music. We are excited about Vertov’s musical approach to using documentary footage, we are fascinated by the celebrated creativity of the depicted working class collective. At the same time, the apparent propaganda and thorough ignorance towards the vulnerability and mortality of the human body in this film make us want to vomit.

Excerpts of »Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbass« by Dziga Vertov can be found here: https://vimeo.com/78435265

From 22 to 24 November, the Splitter Orchestra will present the second Splitter Music Festival. Under the title “Counterbalance!” new compositions, improvisations and performances can be experienced in large format. Click here for the Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/472892383508419/

Program:
22.11.
7:30 p.m. | Betonhalle
Skills: ENTHUSIASM (2019, UA) for Splitter Orchestra
9 p.m. | Dome hall
Magnus Granberg: Let Pass My Weary Guiltless Ghost (2019, BE) for Skogen

23.11.
7:30 p.m. | Dome hall
Splitter Orchestra: Vortex
9 p.m. | Betonhalle
Oren Ambarchi & Will Guthrie

24.11.
4 – 8 p.m. | silent green
Splitter Orchestra, Skills, Skogen, Oren Ambarchi & Will Guthrie: Continuum / Big Circus

Ticketlink: https://splitter.loveyourartist.store/de/ or at Abendkasse Silent Green

Venue: silent green Kulturquartier, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin

sponsored by the Capital Culture Fund | Media Partners: Deutschlandradio Kultur, digital in berlin, field notes, tip Berlin | Partner: Steinway & Sons, silent green

Welcome to Hell

Camilla Milena Fehér — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 09:56:34 +0000

Two performers enter the stage incognito. Masks are often the reason why protests are broken up ahead of schedule. They have an escalating effect that can be observed again and again whenever the protesters’ “black block” (“Schwarzer Block”) encounters equally masked police – the performance do not only celebrate this never-changing ritual, but also gradually transform and reinterpret it.
http://www.kampnagel.de/en/program/welcome-to-hell–eine-dokumentarische-konzert-performance/

Field

eno — Mon, 08 May 2017 10:32:36 +0000

Field stations, as Western intelligence services’ spying facilities are called, are shielded from the public. They are hidden in deserts and forests or under giant white domes – visible monuments to invisible communication networks. In a concert / performance, the duo SKILLS creates a spectrum of meanings symbolically charged by transmission-, reception- and surveillance technologies. A choreography involving microphones, antennae, voices from a laptop, bugs and audiotapes.

Pionier Geist

Camilla Milena Fehér — Fri, 26 May 2017 12:41:18 +0000

SKILLS summon up a spirit that won’t let us be. What do former Thälman pioneers, the pioneers of electronic music, entrepreneurs working at their own risk, freelance artists, pioneer soldiers, early movers and discoverers in space have in common? The two protagonists lend their voices, their instruments and their machines to the pioneer spirit, grapple with it and become obsessed by it. How could all of this get such a hold on us?

Megaphone Choir

Camilla Milena Fehér — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 16:58:11 +0000

The megaphone choir sings with the ghostly voices of a vanished place. 12 women with megaphones set interview-statements of former residents, tenants and contractors of the so called “Esso Houses” at Hamburg Reeperbahn to music and amplify* them. In 2009, the major corporation „Bayerische Hausbau” bought those buildings, speculating on its demolition from the very beginning.

The “Esso Houses” with affordable apartments, shops, legendary night clubs and bars and last but not least a gas station which functioned as “village square” had developed into an important part of St.Paulis everyday live. Due to alleged acute danger of collapse, the “Esso Houses” were been evicted 2013 and demolished 2014.

The megaphone choir was part of the demonstrations against the rapid gentrification of the St. Pauli district. Over years it contributed to the political debates around the “Esso Houses”. The performance ESSO HÄUSER ECHO was functioning as a funeral service for the buildings after the eviction. It´s a performance dealing with a moment of failure of political resistance to point out the difference between mourning and resignation.

The megaphone Choir with only female members uses word-for-word interview-texts and amplifies voices arosing from private speech. Often one can hear the speakers struggling for the right words. It creates a powerful and unusual form of political statement, avoiding the eloquent, rousing speech that is familiar to us from political agitation.

Der Aufbau

eno — Thu, 11 May 2017 15:50:13 +0000

What happens, when building up a reality based on Utopias? Which useful material will be left from a past system of a bygone era? Which ideas, which matrix guarantee a sufficient cohesion? How are human beings establishing their relation to the world of objects?

SKILLS are referring to these questions, while following a dense set of scenic experiments. In addition “Der Aufbau” is recalling the typical situation of performing artists, when entering an empty stage to create a performance and to decide about its technical demands. Both protagonists are constantly setting up, giving the impression to follow an exact scheme. In an atmosphere of preparation, rising tension and permanently making propositions, it resolves into a fruitful process of growth and transformation – a “dance of things”, which lets the objects resonate and relations flow.

SKILLS is taking you at the threshold: between music and sound, between body and Utopia, between trial and discipline. The Industrial of the eigthies, Adorno and the ruling Zeitgeist are entangled within objects, bodies and sound into a landscape.