Rooted in the tradition of the Company el contrabando, buzzing landscape is a contemporary, experimental Flamenco dance production. The „hot„ Flamenco is confronted with a cooling system. An installation with some 15 refrigerators houses the dancers on the stage. The refrigerators, replete with trays and shelves on their insides like viscera in bodies, buzz to oneself. As the audience takes their places in the theatre, they imagine themselves to be inside a refrigerator. The Flamenco is put on ice, some parts of which become defrosted and worn. Through this process, its components break free from the context, become alienated and take on a new identity: clear, abstract, scrutinising. The buzzing and whirring sounds of the refrigerators are compositionally built upon, and are synthetically turned into polyphonic sounds. Flamenco sounds that have been put on ice are defrosted and integrated into the composition like a memory from the past.

The refrigerator as an object of variable temperatures and aggregate states, as a symbol of slowdown, of freezing and defrosting. What is put on ice is stored above cooled liquid; what is gaseous controls the cooling units. The refrigerator separates cold from warm. Cool inside and warm outside, it wants to be closed so that it can later be opened. Contrarily, the human body is warm inside, and cools down through perspiration that emerges from its surface. Its muscles are put under various states of tension, themselves comparable with different aggregate states, Aggregate states as “qualitatively different, temperature and pressure-dependent, physical states of substances”. The muscles of the body has his own “aggregate states”: moments of tension, release and collapse.

Also Flamenco dance has his different aggregate states. In buzzing landscape, these states become analysed. Poses are one of its distinguishing elements - hard and firm, they threaten to solidify latently, and then suffocate from freezing. With the melting process, they are freed from their solid form, and turn into other states. Footwork is another central element of Flamenco dance. Seen from a physical perspective, a bang is produced by the thump of the feet - a sudden, impulsive change of density in the air. The shock wave that spreads around the room get perceived as sound. Depending on the strength of the impact, it can trigger another shock wave and convey another state.

Buzzing landscape – A journey through a system of refrigeration and heating, opening and closing, flux and solidification, freezing and defrosting, slowdown and reduction, tradition an further development, retrospection and vision, of different aggregate states of the dancing body and his movements.

buzzing landscape

Premiere 2011, Haus der Kunst, Solothurn / CH