Symphony X (installation version)


with Redux Orchestra
2012 // Stadsschouwburg Utrecht

lighting and set design by Tino Sehgal // premiered at the Springdance Festival Utrecht 2012 //
performed by Redux Orchestra


[image: sym x ts 2]
[image: sym x ts 1]
[image: sym x ts 3]




For this Springdance premiere Meyers will perform his most ambitious work so far featuring the 16-member REDUX ORCHESTRA in an evolving space designed by Tino Sehgal. Symphony X is a love letter to neo minimal no-wave music, a style that came into being in New York City in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. In this very physical work, compositional procedures influenced by composers such as Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham meet elements from post punk, minimalism and contemporary music. Musical situations at a steady 120bpm are exposed to a permanent web of construction and deconstruction, leading the audience’s expectations astray. The German newspaper ‘Die Zeit’ called it “a completely new music that doesn't even have a name yet.” The composer and musician JG Thirwell aka Foetus describes the work this way: “a vividly evolving, involving minimalist meditation that is propelled by a rock backbeat. It pummels thru a dizzyingly unrelenting series of progressions, existing somewhere at an intersection of Branca, Glass, and Love Of Life Orchestra."

While symphonic music has changed drastically over the course of the last 250 years, the formats of its presentation, the concert, basically has not. Tino Sehgal, an artist who has redefined the format of the exhibition, will create a spatial and temporal framework for the symphony, which will be as ever-changing as the music itself and can be described as a ‘choreographed space’.

-from the Springdance website

photos©Springdance/Anna van Kooij 2012