TECNI - a chaos cabaret
No idyll without disaster – no disaster without idyll
TECNI is the result of a television programme from 2007 (Den 11. Time) with Per Nørgård, one of Denmark's greatest living composers. This gave the public the first opportunity to see him play works he had written as a child and teenager. They were written as accompaniment to him and his brother Bent Nørgård’s own cartoon film.
The programme inspired director Jacob F. Shokking and sound designer Gert Sørensen to create a musical show.
In 1979, Nørgård went to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art to attend a Schønberg Concert. On his way through the museum he ran in to the exhibition Outsiders with the mentally ill, Swiss artist and poet Adolf Wölfli. Nørgård was so fascinated by Wölfli’s art that influenced many of his compositions in the subsequent years.
The libretto is written by the the danish writer Ursula Andkjær Olsen. She has gathered and partially rewritten texts by Per and Bent Nørgård and Adolf Wölfli in to a world populated by peculiar figures from Nørgård’s cartoon film.
TECNI takes place in an imaginary New York. It’s a medley of the young Nørgård’s idea of a mega-Manhattan, inspired by the post-war American entertainment music and the rambling tale of a fantasy New York that Adolf Wölfli created from contemporary illustrated magazines in his cell in a mental hospital in Switzerland.
The show moves from today’s Nørgård, behind the piano – his drawn childhood tales of Tor and Loki’s adventurous journey from Valhalla to New York – to Adolf Wölfli’s Avantgarde Travel Agency to explore New York's parquet cobbled streets – and to the pompous ball rooms og the imaginary city where you dance Nørgård’s "OrangoTango".
TECNI’s lively musical and dramatic universe finds its visual counterpart in Jacob F. Schokking’s staging. The show unfolds in a dynamic video set design which makes it possible to orchestrate both grandiose visual sequences and intimate theater in surprising shifts.
HELENE GJERRIS
FIGURA ENSEMBLE
Text
PER & BENT NØRGÅRD, ADOLF WÖLFLI,
URSULA ANDKJÆR OLSEN
Staging:
JACOB F. SCHOKKING, HOLLAND HOUSE.
Music:
PER NØRGÅRD
Sound design:
GERT SØRENSEN
Video Design:
SPILD AF TID/WASTE OF TIME
Lighting design:
FREDERIK HEITMANN
Sound:
JACOB F. JENSEN
Info:
TECNI plays from april 21st - may 9th 2012 at SILOEN on EDISON: Edisonvej 10, 1856 Frederiksberg.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: Kl. 20.00 (8PM)
Saturday: Kl. 17.00 (5 PM)
Sunday: Kl. 15.00 (3 PM)
Buy your ticket here
With support from
Danish Composers´ Society´s Production Pool / KODA´s Fund for Social and Cultural Purposes
