CODA

Year & Context

2014

Original Production

About the Production

CODA – Bach’s Cello Suite in C minor continues an intermedial series of works by THEATER DER KLÄNGE that includes HOEReographien and SUITE intermediale. At its centre stands the cultural heritage of Bach’s music and the foundational forms of European baroque dance — confronted with the possibilities of contemporary electronic sound and interactive video technology.

In the first part, cellist Beate Wolff performs the suite live. The dance movements — Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Gavotte, Gigue — are taken up by Nina Hänel and Phaedra Pisimisi in a precisely structured spatial choreography drawing on baroque dance notation. Interactive video projections trace the paths of their movement in real time, turning the stage floor into a luminous, living image surface.

The CODA — the second part — opens with an electronic transformation: Thomas Neuhaus uses Bach’s cello music as raw material, transforming and extending it live. At the same time, the dancers become musicians through their movement: their physical input directly controls the electronic sound and the interactive video projections. What the press described as “a small miracle” is exactly this simultaneity: dance that sounds. Images that move because a body moves.

“Whoever loses their culture loses themselves.” — Mario Vargas Llosa

Funded by the City of Düsseldorf, the State of NRW, the Fonds Darstellende Künste and the Stiftung van Meeteren.