Tanhua
Collaboration: Marco Spitzbarth (Fine Arts/Digital Art, Zurich University of the Arts), Ingjerd Holten Ytterdal (Fine Arts/Painting, Academy of Visual Arts, Baptist University Hong Kong), Leonard So (Fine Arts/Theory, Academy of Visual Arts, Baptist University Hong Kong), Diego Kohn (Sound/Zurich University of the Arts)
Xu Lizhi, a Foxconn worker, channelled his emotions through poems before he committed suicide at the age of 24.
Through movement, sound, audio recordings, time and space, our goal is to evoke the audience’s emotions connected to the meaningless boredom of working behind the assembly line. The three hour performance paints a picture of migrant labourer’s invisible struggle of finding purpose in 14 hours shift of repetitive movements.
For more info about this project, please click here
Mush-room / 凹凹
MINIATURE 1
MINIATURE 1 was born of the encounter of composer and performer Diego Kohn and dancer and choreographer Léonard Engel during the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music 2018, and of their common interest in initiating a cross-disciplinary collaboration to explore new ways to link their respective practices.
The piece reduces music and movement to their bare essence: a single note generated by bowing the viola is put in parallel with a single movement executed by the dancer. Both are stretched endlessly through time, revealing another layer to their apparent simplicity.
The audience’s attention is gradually drawn to the multitude of small and involuntary interferences that arise from the minimalism of the performance, disrupting its continuity. The music tries to keep a constant form, yet oscillates between the clear note of a drone and the mere sound of the bow rubbing against the string. Meanwhile, the body slowly twists itself in an ever-changing motion, taken by uncontrollable tremor and sweating. The small imperfections become perceptible and generate new profiles in sound and movement.
By rendering the intentional part of the performance obsolete, Kohn and Engel aim at pointing out the similarities of the imperfections arising in both music and movement. Those irregularities produce a continuous fluttering over the piece and become what links musician and dancer: the proof of a common imperfect nature, of a common humanity.
https://vimeo.com/302599799/9d9b4befd6
Happily Ever After
Collaboration: Jiaming August Liao (Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong), Mei Ting Spencer Poon (Visual Art, Hong Kong Baptist University), Claudio Rainolter (Design, Zurich University of the Arts), Jingying Zhang (New Media Art, Taipei National University of the Arts), Diego Kohn (Music, Zurich University of the Arts)
The action of eating and drinking involves people from different cultures into the same ritual. With this ritual one finds the dimensions of spoken and unspoken parts. On the one hand the food is what we eat, taste, look at, touch, smell; on the other hand it is a process until the food is served onto our plates.
For more info about this project, please click here
Etude of Time
Collaboration: Fang Yun Yang (Dancer, Taiwan), Joey Tan (Musician, China) and Diego Kohn (Musician, Argentina)
Etude of time a music & dance collaboration from the composer and performer Diego Kohn from Argentina, the musician and dancer Joey Tan from Taiwan and the dancer and choreographer Fang Yun from China during the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music 2018.
In our piece (work in progress), we explore the perception of time. How can we warp the performers’ and audience’s sense of scientific time using different sounds and movements? Using different intensities? As well as different permutations of dynamics and energies between performers? Using set blocks of time as a grid, marked by short samples of field recordings, we attempt to manipulate the relative nature of time.