Große*Fuge

Also in the fifth part of the monumental piece of music Katharsis, the recording of a thunderous waterfall forms the basis for a whole universe of tones and sounds, some of them floating free, others following the pulse of the roaring water. Picking up the thread of the dance theatre piece *Katharsis, Bert Gstettner and his dancers now highlight Rabl´s audiospacial mise en scéne. The choreography Grosse*Fuge premiered at the Halle 1030 TanzHalleWien, a huge old sports hall with about 600 m2 of space. In this performance, dancers, sound and audience melt into an integral whole.

Grosse*Fuge is no excerpt from *Katharsis, but an autonomous choreographical work. It is particularly suitable to be combined with *Katharsis on a two-part theatre evening, but it matches well also with other performances

Choreography Bert Gstettner Music, Sound Design Günther Rabl
Sound Design assistence Florian Bogner, Lisa Rozman Stage Design Gernot Sommerfeld, Bert Gstettner Costume Design Renée Diamant Light Design Klaus Greif Dance Stephanie Cumming, Tanja Pastonjicki, Doris Reisinger, Bert Gstettner, Dominik Mayrhofer-Grünbühel, Alexander Strauß, Filip Szatarski

Music

Katharsis
The recording of a waterfall is the basis for all the parts of the composition: not only as the score, but especially as the inexhaustible reservoir of shapes and courses which can be derived from it with different methods of analysis.

Part 5 - Grosse Fuge
A skilled musician would be able to create hundreds of different tones and sounds with a violin bow, on a flat sound generator (such as a metal plate, a gong or a tamtam). Such a model is the foundation for the Grosse Fuge - only that it´s not a violin bow to evoke the tones but once more the roaring of the water masses: vitreous, metallic, breathlike the tones build upon one another, some of them floating free, others following the pulse of the roaring water. Like huge, multidimensional waves across all eight systems of speakers more and more dense layers build up, which make the sound of the whole surface perceptible.

Günther Rabl

Press Clippings

"(...) Now the big gym hall makes itself felt, the action takes place on a broad cross-shaped area. Here the six dancers rush to and fro, fill the airy soundspace both in the horizontal and in the vertical sense, appearing on stilts or hanging from a rope. Especially the incredibly inventive dance scenes, executed in a puristic way, make a deep impression within this conglomerate of extreme movement and still form.”
Ursula Kneiss, Der Standard, October 19./20th, 2002

“ (...) As if their natural body language would be in conflict with the artificiality of the environment - and this is another interesting component in a performance that is to be remembered most of all because of its pictures - the climbing scenes on the wall, the giant on stilts, the wormlike seals on the floor and the extraterrestrial atmosphere make this performance substantial.”
tanz.at, October 2002

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GROSSE*FUGE