PANTOPIA FESTIVAL VOL. 02 - NEW FEELING
DAY 1
19.08.
FREE ENTRY
ABOUT PANTOPIA
For two days, contemporary art, pantopian music and extraordinary performances can be experienced free of charge on the banks of the Spree in Oberschöneweide. International artists from Kazakhstan, Serbia, China and the USA will bring a wide-ranging programme to Berlin: a 16-piece orchestra meets jazz avant-garde, multimedia installation meets live performance, a Kazakh shaman meets contemporary art. With the PANTOPIA FESTIVAL, a new artistic format is emerging in Berlin’s south-east in the exciting cultural quarter between the industrial past and the creative future.
Join us!
EXHIBITIONS
SUMMER OF POSSIBILITIES / WHERE WITHIN
From the development of Abstract Expressionism to the importance of history in art, SUMMER OF POSSIBILITIES brings together various artists who explore the limitless possibilities of abstraction. In WHERE WITHIN, artists JC Jacinto and Zean Cabangis explore the relationship between people and place. The act of observing, discovering, documenting and constructing their surroundings becomes an act of blurring the boundaries between space and being.
Works by Anthony Akinbola, Louis Cameron, Ryan Cosbert, Keltie Ferris, Tomashi Jackson, Stephanie Lüning, Chris Martin, David Reed, Tariku Shiferaw, Joan Snyder, Sylvia Snowden / Zean Cabangis & JC Jacinto
More info here!
A POUND OF PICTURES
Alec Soth travelled around the United States between 2018 and 2021, photographing people, places and situations that caught his attention. He also viewed and collected photographs sold at flea markets and online, which led him to reflect on the meaning of being a photographer and how photographs exist in the world.
More info here!
PROGRAM
sponsor
The PANTOPIA FESTIVAL is a project of the Marc Sinan Company and YMUSIC, with the kind support of the Industriesalons eV, the Reinbeckhallen, BaseCamp, the Kiosk Schönewelle and the Café Schöneweile as part of the Kultursommerfestival Berlin 2022.
OPENING SURVIVAL
The transmedial music installation SURVIVAL tells of the terrors of survival, of painful love after death. In this contemporary variation of the Orpheus myth, love is not a metaphysical abstract, but very real and tangible. Its victory consists in carrying on after loss, in survival.
On a spiral path, the visitors are drawn sonically and visually into the fictitious underworld and confronted with the question of the possibilities of (survival). Position and movement determine the perception of the narrative of the one-hour composition, which combines traditional music from Asia and Europe in a new way.
The sounds and voices of the musicians from China and Europe, a countertenor and a performer control the video production, which is distributed across 32 interactive LED panels. The result is a 360-degree world of sound and images of hypnotic intensity.
More info here!
Marc Sinan is a composer and guitarist. In his work, he explores new ways of collaboration between artists in a transcultural and transmedial context. He usually works as composer, artistic director, guitarist and producer with his own ensemble, the Marc Sinan Company, as well as with changing international guests and institutional partners. Recordings of his works are released by ECM Records. His mostly full-length works address current socio-political issues. They are performed internationally and have been guests at festivals such as the Schleswig-Holstein Musikfestival, Istanbul Festival, MaerzMusik as well as at the Oper Halle, Oper Wuppertal, Theater Bremen, Humboldt-Forum Berlin, the Gorki Theater and the Wiener Konzerthaus. Sinan has collaborated with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, the Dresdner Sinfoniker, the Ensemble ConTempo Beijing, the Belgrade Ensemble Metamorphosis, as well as international artists from Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. Sinan lives and works in Berlin.
Daniel Eichholz, percussionist, was born in Wolfsburg and studied classical percussion at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg and at the Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” Berlin. In addition to his passion for classical and contemporary music, he has been active for years in the electronic music scene and in pop/rock as a live and studio drummer as well as a composer. He works with many important composers, including Wolfgang Rihm, Helmut Lachenmann and Sarah Nemtsov. Eichholz also performs with renowned orchestras and ensembles such as the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. As a drummer, he plays with the multiple gold award-winning 2raumwohnung, Squintaloo, Schulz und Soehne and has worked as a studio drummer for Marlon, Tenement and Tocotronic, among others. Concert tours have taken him as far as China, South Africa and North America.
Oğuz Büyükberber, the Turkish-born clarinettist, moves in his musical work between contemporary composition, improvisation, Turkish music and jazz. He studied bass clarinet and has performed at several major festivals throughout Europe, including the North Sea, Traumzeit, Akbank and London Jazz Festivals. His nine CDs and his participation in over 50 album productions have been released by Blue Note and ECM, among others. Today he lives in Amsterdam and works with international musicians such as Simon Nabatov, Gerry Hemingway, Guus Janssen, Claudio Puntin and Wolfgang Reisinger. In 2012 he received a “Carte Blanche” from the “Bimhuis” in Amsterdam, and in 2011 he was named a Selmer Artist. In 2018, a CD of the Marc Sinan Company as a duo with Marc Sinan was released by ECM.
The countertenor Daniel Gloger always inspires composers to create unusual and new sounds. In over 200 world premieres, he has collaborated with many of Europe’s top ensembles of new music and has made guest appearances at the state operas in Berlin, Dresden and Stuttgart, the Opéra National de Paris and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, among others. He sang the title role in the opera Mondparsifal by Bernhard Lang (director: Jonathan Meese) at the Vienna Festival and the Berlin Festival.
THE BARDIC DIVA
The Kazakh singer Ulzhan Baibussynova represents the venerable tradition of the epic singers Zhyrau. As a soloist, she performs poetry and accompanies herself on the dombra, a plucked lute. Baibussynova is an unmistakable role model for a generation of younger women who are challenging the traditional gender boundaries in Kazakh music.
DER SINGENDE KOPF / SURVIVAL
Can we overcome our physical and mental inadequacies by collecting and analysing more and more digital data? Would we find fulfilment in death if we mastered it virtually? And would the internet then be the key to eternal love?
The multimedia performance THE SINGING HEAD – SURVIVAL, which combines music, drama and media art, seeks answers to these questions in motifs from Ovid’s story of Orpheus and Euridice and the Chinese opera “The Peony Pavilion”.
A video projection distributed on 32 interactive LED panels makes the boundaries between reality and virtuality, between this world and the next disappear on stage. In the composition, the live musicians on site enter into a multimedia dialogue with recordings of traditional Chinese instruments and, under the constraints of an algorithmic beat, explore new possibilities of communication beyond familiar social hierarchies.
More info here!
Rike Schuberty is an actress, puppeteer and musician who grew up in Berlin. During her studies at the Ernst Busch Academy in Berlin, she was already engaged as a performer in film productions and at theatres such as TAT Frankfurt and Theater Basel and played in bands such as Contriva, Masha Qrella, Noel and Britta. Since graduating, Schuberty has worked mainly as a freelance theatre performer at theatres such as Volksbühne Berlin, Theater Baden-Baden, NT Halle and Oper Wuppertal. Since 2009 she has been producing her own theatre evenings in various formats in cooperation with Sophiensaelen Berlin, LOFFT Leipzig, Societaetstheater Dresden. She has also been working as a director since 2021.
Ulrike Langenbein works as a performer, puppet maker, stage and costume designer and director and lives in Berlin. She works with Marc Sinan, Claudia Bauer, Suse Wächter, Yael Ronen, Konrad Kästner, Moritz Sostmann, the Maxim Gorki Theater, Berliner Ensemble, Theater an der Ruhr, Oper Wuppertal, Puppentheater Halle, Theater Bremen, among others. Her first short film “Hinter Glas” can be seen on the portal of the figurentheaterfestival nürnberg erlangen fürth. She has worked for many years with Rike Schuberty, with whom she collaborated on “Faust Zweiter Teil”, “Der singende Kopf” (music: Marc Sinan), “Visionen” (Schillertheater Berlin) “Die Republik der Käfer”, “Hinter Glas” and “Chaosmos” (with Marc Sinan and Konrad Kästner). She works as a coach at the Théâtre de la Marionnette Paris or with the Company Anagoor (Venice), among others.
DU YUN & OK MISS
New York-based Chinese composer, multi-instrumentalist and performance artist Du Yun and her band Ok Miss present an explosive mix of indie pop, rock and contemporary chamber music. For the PANTOPIA FESTIVAL, the Pulitzer Prize winner has put together a programme that breaks genre boundaries and musical traditions.
DU YUN, born and raised in Shanghai, China, and currently based in New York City, works at the intersection of opera, orchestral, theatre, cabaret, musical, oral tradition, public performances, electronics, visual arts, and noise. Her body of work is championed by some of today’s finest performing groups and organizations around the world.
Known for her “relentless originality and unflinching social conscience”(The New Yorker), Du Yun’s second opera, Angel’s Bone (libretto by Royce Vavrek), won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music. She was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Composition category for her work Air Glow. Her collaborative opera Sweet Land with Raven Chacon (for opera company The Industry) was the 2021 Best New Opera by the North America Critics Association. Four of her feature studio albums were named The New Yorker’s Notable Recordings of the Year, in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, respectively. A community champion, Du Yun was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble; served as the Artistic Director of MATA Festival (2014-2018); conceived the Pan Asia Sounding Festival (National Sawdust); and founded FutureTradition, a global initiative that illuminates the provenance lineages of folk art and uses these structures to build cross-regional collaborations from the ground up. Du Yun was named one of 38 Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Foundation (2018), “Artist of the Year” by the Beijing Music Festival (2019). In 2022, she was granted a Creative Capital Award for an AR inter-generational Kun-opera project. Other notable awards include Guggenheim, American Academy Berlin Prize, Fromm Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Aakash Mittal is an alto saxophonist, composer and writer. In his music, he employs colorful dissonances, meditative silences and angular rhythms to express environments and spaces ranging from the American west to the dense streets of Kolkata.
As a a composer Mittal has written extensively for a variety of ensembles and mediums composing over one hundred new works. Recent commissions include Samay Raga for Wind Ensemble for Lawrence University and the found-sound piece Ghosts (2017) for BOMB Magazine, and a work for solo violin for MarieFaith Lane (2022). Mittal performed with ensembles such as the Milford Graves Trio, Du Yun’s Ok Miss, Amir Elsaffar’s Rivers of Sound and the Brooklyn Raga Massive, travelling nationally to stages in New York City, Kansas, Chicago and Denver but also internationally, such as the Congo Square Jazz Festival in India. He has been awarded several awards for his work in Jazz and contemporary music, most recently he received the fellowship of the Gabriella Lena Frank Creative Academy (2022).
Shayna Dunkelman is a musician and percussionist based in New York. She is known for her versatile and unique techniques, together with a use of electronics to access a sonic pallet not found in acoustic percussion. Born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, she graduated with honors in both music and mathematics from Mills College in Oakland, CA in 2007. As part of the band Xiu Xiu, Dunkelmann toured the world for six years, thereby getting increasingly active in the alternative music scene. Since then, she performed with the Puerto Rican electro-acoustic band Balún, Grammy Award Winning artist Attacca Quartet, the LA Opera Orchestra, as well as many pioneers of avant-garde experimental musicians such as Yuka C. Honda, John Zorn, Yoko Ono and Thurston Moore. She works closely with Pulitzer-Price winner Du Yun on world premiering pieces featuring her multifaceted percussion playing.
Guitarist and singer Grey Mcmurray has been called “simultaneously chilling and moving”(The Deli Magazine), “sublimely odd”(New York Magazine), and “the world’s least obtrusive guitarist”(The Guardian). He has performed/recorded with artists including Gil-Scott Heron, Meshell Ndegeocello, Tyondai Braxton, Alarm Will Sound, Du Yun, Skuli Sverrisson, Beth Orton, Colin Stetson, Sam Amidon, Ali Sethi, John Cale and Laraaji among others. He released his solo debut, Stay Up, on Shahzad Ismaily’s Figureight Records in September 2019. The new collaborative quartet of Grey, Melvin Gibbs, Greg Fox and Sasha Frere-Jones, Body Meπa, released their “transient oasis, heady but cautiously optimistic”(Robert Christgau) debut in December 2020. He was recently Beth Orton’s music director on her June 2022 tour in support of Alanis Morrisette. He hopes everyday to provoke joyful tears in strangers’ eyes.
OPEN AIR KINO
Film classics for the whole family in a relaxed atmosphere can be experienced at the open-air cinema on the banks of the Spree. Get comfortable on deck chairs, picnic blankets or cushions on the Spree meadow at the Kaisersteg. An open-air cinema of a special kind!
Tickets are available at the box office or from the event partner Kino-Union.
