Barokthegreat / Michiel Klein (I/NL)
Russian Mountains
audio-visual performance
production Xing/Netmage 11
world premiere
Russian Mountains is an audiovisual performance that puts the musicians behind the wheel of an invention vehicle that tends to focus attention toward a common centrality, a unique source of light and sound. Born from the meeting between Italian duo Barokthegreat and dutch musician Michiel Klein, the project reinterprets new media in a physical way, exalting the details of the gestures of craftsmanship and the mechanics of human movement, symmetry and perspective. Symbolism and geometry are remixed in an aesthetic of reverb.
Barokthegreat operates in the vast basin of the performing arts with particular attention to the physicality of sound, the mental roots of movement and visual architecture. Directed by dancer-choreographer Sonia Brunelli and musician Lelia Gharib it began in 2008 with Barok. In 2009 Xing commissioned Wrestling – Intuitions about the World Waiting to Become a Completed Construction for F.I.S.Co.09. In 2010 the duo were winners of the World Prize with The Origin, performance conceived in collaboration with London director Simon Vincenzi for Sujet à Vif/Festival d’Avignon 08, later selected with Fidippide for Marathon of the Unexpected, a new section dedicated to experimental experience in the 7th Festival of Contemporary Dance at the Venice Biennial.
Michiel Klein is a dutch musician, founder of the bands Adept and Eklin. The uncompromised electro noise of Adept was hard, straightforward and uncomfortable, filled with screeching guitars, unnerving vocals and bare dark beats. With Adept, he toured Europe and the USA, as well as opening for the Gossip, Health and !!!. Eklin is his new band: a five-piece that uses a traditional band line-up to reconstruct songs into haunting sound collages that are darkly upsetting, strangely familiar, yet surprisingly groovy.