“Am I an audience or part of the show?”

CIRCLES. A music performance in public space by Marie Bues, Amir Shpilman, Ariel Cohen and Yair Kira

Every city has its rhythm from daily routines. Each city forms a structure of transactions, conversations and encounters. Every city has a structure of sounds, smells, emotions and colours. The choral symphony CIRCLES translates this complex pattern into a large-scale choral performance for hundreds of participants, choirs and individuals. Composer Amir Shpilman, director Marie Bues, dancer Ariel Cohen, artists Yair Kira and Naoto Hieda and conceptor Kerstin Wiehe develop together with 300 choristers a ritual, a chaotic-eruptive celebration of the complex city and the people in it.

CIRCLES means above all music. The structure of this new choral music is so simple that it can be rehearsed in guided workshops with about 300 singers. The influence of the sound through the immediate proximity to the musicians will irritate the audience during the performances, as well as question their orientation in space and their role during the choral ritual.

CIRCLES is interdisciplinary, experimental, but above all, CIRCLES is a remarkable reinterpretation of the idea of space-sound and the idea of music as a community-building, but possibly also beautifully disturbing ritual. Amir Shpilman, who as a composer and conductor is interested in the physicality of music, has around 300 singers perform together with the dancer and choreographer Ariel Cohen. The moving-sounding actions are flanked by 3D colour choreographies developed by visual artist and designer Yair Kira. A bird’s eye view camera transfers the changes in the concentric circle of the performers onto a building. The project is directed by Marie Bues, director and since 2013 in tandem with Martina Grohmann artistic director of Theater Rampe in Stuttgart.

Amir Shpilman’s vision is to emphasize the power of collective intelligence through a large-scale composition in which voice, color and movement are in constant exchange. Based on the principles of self-organized systems and interactions between individuals, a mass swarm of rich colors and sounds will emerge and swirl in and around the audience. CIRCLES will be fulfilled when the audience moving in this swarm and exposed to this extremely intense experience will ask themselves: “Am I a spectator or part of the performance?”

With the CIRCLES online platform, connections between different choirs and individuals will already occur, starting in May/June 2021 – until the joint live performance in autumn 2021.

In addition to exercises and instructions for self-study of circulating sounds, movements and colour choreographies, the users are motivated to try, test and create things together and to make video recordings of their own creations with the technology available in every SmartPhone or mobile computer.

This way, all interested singers can already start to work on their own ideas for the joint premiere in October 2021, exchange them and get in touch with each other!

The link to the platform will be activated here with the opening of the festival.