In your Head

Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 8 is one of the best-known canonical works of music history. With their new project “In your Head”, the Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop in cooperation with choreographer Pol Pi will scour the composition for a (perhaps unintentional) connection between underlying structures and surface layers. In this way, the ensemble hopes to enable viewers and musicians alike to experience and perceive the piece beyond the traditional listening experience and offer a different angle to understanding this supposedly thoroughly interpreted work.

The Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop will perform Shostakovich’s piece twice in a row, interpret it in various modes and performatively express the transformations these elicit. At times, the instruments will fall silent during the performance to create space for the dancers to express the music in a purely physical, choreographed form. The absence of the acoustic line will direct attention to how music can assume form in movement. At the same time, the danced score will reveal what positions, gestures and body images each musician had rehearsed, and how bodies are influenced by cultural practices like playing music.

The instrumental-choreographic interpretation will be supplemented by a vocal component. This will be expressed as the non-tonal utterance of the notes as syllables, as well as the recitation of texts written by the musicians during the rehearsal phase regarding their music background and biography. By intertwining autobiographical and musical working methods, Kaleidoskop and Pol Pi blur the genre boundaries, challenge the conventions of musical performance, and advocate the position that political and aesthetic realities cannot be viewed independently of one another.

Concept, choreography and artistic direction: Pol Pi
Creation and performance:  Anna Faber, Mia Bodet, Yodfat Miron, Isabelle Klemt and Sophie Notte
Dramaturgy: Gilles Amalvi
Production: Sarah Becher

Performances: “Danse” festival, Montpellier: 23–24 Jun. 2022; Radialsystem V, Berlin: 24–26 Feb. 2023; additional performances: Pact Zollverein and others