Organized by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra
Music Director: Jaap Van Zweden
Co-Founder/Advisor: Anna-Sophia Van Zweden
Curator-at-Large: Muriel Quancard
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Wagner’s Die Walküre, both written in the fervor of the 19th century, were key inspirations for SOLUNA 2018. These prophetic works can be seen as battles between light and shadow, their beauty residing in a tension between a glorifed present and an uncertain future. In a series of commissioned works SOLUNA reflected on the symbolic space defined by the interplay of darkness and light.
Richard Wagner anticipated cinematic and contemporary multimedia art by integrating music and drama. The composer’s great- great-grandson, visual artist Antoine Wagner, explores this artistic legacy in a new video. Between Silence hinged on the confluence of crisp blue skies and ghostly snowscapes combined with the synergy of sound and silence. Jennifer Wester further addressed the relationship between artistic creation and its reception in a performance reminiscent of pre-cinematic spectacle. The artist’s body moved interpretively across an ice skating rink emerging from a three-dimensional field of light and shadow.
Jen Ray treated the subject metaphorically to expose the excesses of American society. In Eyes As Bright As Diamonds, she created a sonic and visual feast by combining elements from American popular culture — a lead
singer, a color guard and a drumline. Also fascinated by cultural hybridity, Gonzalo Lebrija worked with a group of female Mariachi to interpret compositions by Wagner. This non- conventional musical performance transcended cultural rifts.
Lihuel González’s multimedia performance, Las personas no van juntas (They Just Don’t Match), interpreted a speech about the Ninth Symphony into various languages and a musical score. The young Argentinian artist challenged the concept of translation, exposing symbiosis and disruption. Grubnik + Suzanne, a nocturnal performance in the garden of the Nasher Sculpture Center imagined by Dallas artists Jeff Gibbons and Gregory Ruppe, offered a further dislocation of language by intersecting unexpected elements: human voices and a talking tree. The performance engaged visitors in a shadowy world of palpable, yet unearthly experiences.
Naama Tsabar created a sculptural arrangement and performance space in the lobby of the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center. Melodies of Certain Damage was an environment of shattered guitars activated by musicians playing in unusual postures. At NorthPark Center, Sebastien Leon’s sound sculpture, The Diffracted Symphony, offered another sort of wreckage: the painful sight of a disembodied whale rib cage accompanied by excerpts from Verdi’s Requiem.
SOLUNA 2018 encapsulated contrasting views, cautionary tales and allusions to the desire for freedom, asking whether light must always be attained at the price of darkness.
— Muriel Quancard
Muriel would like to extend a special thank you to Anna-Sophia Van Zweden, Jaap Van Zweden, Gillian Friedman, Peter Czornyj, Sarah Whitling, the gifted musicians of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and their dedicated team including Michelle Miller Burns, James Leffler, Kelly Halaszyn, Nathan Lutz, Tom Brekhus, Sean Kelly, Courtney Zimmerman, Denise Mc Govern, Chelsea Norris, Tab Boyles, Debi Pena and Jamie Allen, for their collaboration.
May 11, 2018, 9pm
Melodies Of Certain Damage
World Premiere
Meyerson Symphony Center
Curated by Muriel Quancard
Naama Tsabar creates sensually driven sculptures, installations and performances that evoke questions of power and bravado found in musical and social environments. Her work investigates the themes of intimacy, performativity, sexuality and excess with a minimalist aesthetic.
Throughout her practice, Tsabar repeatedly returns to the iconic act of breaking the guitar. In Melodies of Certain Damage she focuses on the moment following the climactic destructive act. Broken pieces of guitars are scattered on the floor of the Meyerson Symphony Center’s atrium. Strings are reattached to the debris in an unconventional way, creating a site-specific instrument.
Introducing the iconic action into a functioning order undermines the historically gendered use of the guitar in Rock-and-Roll. It also transforms the object into a place. The performers insert themselves into a landscape of vestiges organized into new working order. Utilizing this unique configuration, Tsabar composed a score in collaboration with predominantly female musicians.
The floor-bound installation imposes a different configuration between instrument and body. Musicians must lay on the ground or find atypical positions to interact with the instrument. Given the physical nature of the installation, movement comes into play for musicians to navigate the broken landscape. This choreography generates a vulnerability for the performer and the audience, which produces a new kind of intimacy.
This performance is supported in part by Paramo.
Naama Tsabar is represented by Paramo.
May 13, 2018, 3pm
Las Personas No Van Juntas (They Just Don’t Match)
US Premiere
Co-Curated in collaboration with Katherine Brodbeck, The Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art
Dallas Museum of Art
Las personas no van juntas (They just don’t match) consists of four videos surrounding a stage, waiting to be activated by a musician. On the videos, a philosopher’s speech about Nietzsche’s wish for Zarathustra to be the continuation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is translated simultaneously from Spanish into English into German and back into Spanish. It explores the interpretative, figurative and appropriative qualities of translation. At the same time, a discourse about the possibility of translation between words and music is created.
The video of the original speech shows a person engaged in the act of remembering, of establishing connections and of linking the relationships present in the spoken word in order to transmit concepts. It is a connection made between the power of words, thought and gestures.
This relationship of possible meanings is then embodied in each step of the translation process; each agent attempts to be as faithful as possible to the speech they receive, a speech that becomes invariably porous as it is appropriated by each of them. As they sit in front of the camera, attention is placed on their focused expressions as they receive and process information: a catalogue of tense gestures, curiosity and attention. Meanwhile, the book of sheet music retransmits the operation. This sheet music is composed from the four speeches, and is then appropriated by a musician and activated in different moments throughout the performance.
The Spanish word for translation, traducción (from the latin traductio) is composed of three parts: the prefix trans (from one to the other), the verb ducere (to guide) and the suffix –cion (action)—the action of guiding from one (language or tongue) to the other. Las personas no van juntas is a visual choral performance with a foundation of words. Each agent (philosopher, translators and musician) is captured in an audiovisual portrait that requires physical closeness in order to perceive the particular modulations of voice, intonations and gestures. A thought construction that is made visible through gesticulations, signals and tics, almost like a catalogue.
May 15, 2018, 7:30pm
Mariachi Wagner
Mariachi Rosas Divinas
Jesus Echevarria Musical Arrangement
Jason Koen at The Box Company Fabrication
Moody Performance Hall
Curated by Muriel Quancard
Mariachi Wagner is a musical experiment, during which a series of phonic and visual expressions from Latin American and European cultures interact. Works by the German composer Richard Wagner are interpreted by a mariachi, a group of traditional musicians from Western Mexico. The two separate cultures coexist as Gonzalo Lebrija imagines impromptu relationships between languages, codes, symbols and forms. This staged performance utilizes appropriations, transformations, vicissitudes and ruptures conceivable in a transcultural process.
Deeply rooted in Mexican culture, Mariachi is a traditional musical genre that originated in the state of Jalisco and was performed by musicians wearing charro outfits. The all-female Dallas-based Mariachi, The Rosas Divinas, executes a score adapted from Wagner with their traditional instruments (guitar, guitarrón, violin, trumpet and harp).
Wagner has been universally appropriated by the classical tradition. His music is seen as a referent, not only in his local context, but in Western culture. His work is characterized by operatic musical forms and develops stories inherent to the romantic tradition.
The vibrations, sequences, lyrics, sounds and costumes convey various codes and meanings. The tension caused by the exchange implies a process of transculturation. In this non-conventional musical performance, Lebrija exposes the transfiguration that results from the exchange between techniques, practices and cultural manifestations. Music functions here as a bridge that transcends the frictions generated by tangible borders, hegemonic power, temporality, romanticism and vulnerability.
Gonzalo Lebrija is represented by Travesia Cuatro and Galerie Laurent Godin.
May 16, 2018, 7:30pm
Wagner: A Genius in Exile + Between Silence (World Premiere)
Alamo Drafthouse
Curated by Muriel Quancard
Antoine Wagner presents two films that encompass his photographic and video practice.
Wagner: A Genius in Exile, a lyrical documentary by Andy Sommer, follows Antoine, Richard Wagner’s great-great-grandson, on a journey across Switzerland where the famed composer envisioned some of his great works and the theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of music, literature, stage design and architecture creating the idea of a “Total Artwork.” In order to comprehend the composer, Antoine returns to sites where his ancestor lived, meeting historians, musicologists, musicians and enlightened amateurs, while exploring landscapes that were sources of inspiration. There, he develops a stunning series of photographs titled Exil (2013). In this body of work and others such as Cadence (2015) and Re ections (2017), he explores formal and semantic correspondence between music and visual arts.
Opening the program, his latest video Between Silence (2018) continues to question the interdependence of music and silence and the aesthetic phenomenon of synesthesia. The video is set in the Austrian Alps and shot in Super 8, HD and 16mm fillm. The sound is recorded in silent places insolated by this past winter’s heavy snow falls.
May 17, 2017, 9pm
Grubnik + Suzanne
Co-curated in collaboration with Jed Morse
Nasher Sculpture Center
Grubnik + Suzanne offers an otherworldly excursion in the garden of the Nasher Sculpture Center after dark. A web of interconnected systems dispenses visual and audio elements. A tree emits signals converted into a semi-intelligible language, a voice emerges from a hole in the ground, in this cavity appears a spectral doppelgänger of the singer and scattered sounds form an infrastructure for the whole.
In the velvety obscurity, the once familiar garden is metamorphosed into a sort of Phantasmagoria. In the late 18th century, Phantasmagoria was a performing art form presented in a darkened theater to give the illusion of the supernatural. Images of ghostly apparitions were created by light and shadows using magic lanterns to frighten the audience. Like them, Grubnik + Suzanne relies on present-day technologies – a video projection, a midi interface capturing the electrical signal of the tree, a computer generated code translating the signal into language. Like in Phantasmagoria, the technology is hidden although always present and indispensable.
But Grubnik + Suzanne has different intents. It calls upon our senses to arouse our imagination. We may lose our place momentarily, only to return to our own experience.
The disembodied vocals of Suzanne appear to converse with the tree, keeping us at a distance. The tree articulates incomprehensible elements of the English language while the voice doesn’t form any words. The disarticulation of language keeps us further away.
Through revoking all obvious reference to technology, Gibbons and Ruppe reveal our dependence upon it. As a relational structure, our body and mind aspire to be part of the whole. Like the tree and the concealed singer, they respond to stimuli in their environment. This prompts the question of integration and separation, belonging and isolation.
In this immersive installation, our psychological and physiological experiences may turn into infinite deceit unless we accept our subjection. Or perhaps, we might imagine that there is more to this world than our senses are capable of detecting.
Liz Tonne is an improviser and interpreter of contemporary composition. Using an array of extended vocal techniques, her work explores the edge of the voice as an instrument. As a member of the pioneering ensemble undr quartet she contributed to the presentation of a new wave of ambient minimalism expressed at the turn of the last century often referred to as lowercase music.
Jeff Gibbons is represented by Conduit Gallery.
May 10, 2018
Breaking Shadows
World Premiere (SOLUNA and The Cedars Union Co-Commission)
Proposed by The Cedars Union
The Cedars Union
The body without a shadow is a body in the dark. The shadow without a canvas is an in nite projection of invisibility. Movement needs parameters to be received just as a viewer needs perspective.
Breaking Shadows employs ice skating as the medium to explore the play of shadows of the self – how they interact with each other and with the body. It captures and presents perspectival shifts of the self as its focus moves from the gure to umbra and back again, while the skater’s form ows through space simultaneously in motion and motionless.
The work creates an experiential commentary on the often-overlooked components of the self that make up the whole. An atmospheric musical composition of sounds harvested from ice-skating will accompany the performance, transforming an empty parking lot into a skating rink of enlightenment.
May 6-28, 2018
The Diffracted Symphony
World Premiere (SOLUNA and NorthPark Center Co-Commission)
NorthPark Center
Curated by Muriel Quancard
From pollution and climate change to a soaring human population that bleeds into available resources, humanity has officially entered the Anthropocene period. This era witnesses the alteration of the Earth’s surface atmosphere, climate, oceans and lands as a result of collective human activities, causing biodiversity to drastically decline by 60 percent from 1970 to 2017, according to the Zoological Society of London.
Sebastien Leon’s sound sculpture The Diffracted Symphony, inspired by the rib cage of a whale washed ashore, plays an altered version of Verdi’s Requiem, as a funeral mass for the biological state of the world. The recording used is of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s 2014 performance conducted by Jaap van Zweden. Leon’s plea is to recognize that the challenge of our times is for humanity to understand its power for both destruction and preservation, and our urgent need to act as the caretakers of the Earth’s balance.
This sculpture is supported in part by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States.
May 22, 2018, 7:30pm
Calligraphy: Shadow and Light
World Premiere
Co-curated in collaboration with Jacqueline Chao at Crow Collection for Asian Arts
Artist’s Studio
For over 50 years, Master Shen-Long, a contemporary master of the classical Chinese literati perfections of painting, poetry and calligraphy, has pioneered new approaches to painting that have made him one of the most innovative ink artists of this generation.
In uenced by his deep understanding of Buddhist, Confucian and Daoist philosophies, Master Shen-Long’s bold and experimental work challenges traditional assumptions about Chinese painting, and raises important concepts regarding mankind’s relationship with the universe.
His artistic philosophy is grounded in three philosophical concepts found in Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism: in Confucianism, the concept of “integration between Nature and Mankind”; in Daoism, the concept of “one is wholly in harmony with the way of nature”; and in Buddhism, the concept of “everyone can become Buddha, and through cultivation we can recover our wisdom ability and enlightenment power.”
In this one-night exclusive performance, Master Shen-Long creates a bold new calligraphic ink work at his studio in front of a live audience. Using video technology, the audience is invited
to watch the artist in action in real-time from all angles, as he unveils a new original poetic composition that celebrates the inner light found in all beings. Light and shadow dance across an enormous handmade sheet of traditional high quality Xuan paper (rice paper), whereupon the artist writes using Chinese ink infused with metallic gold power. Sound is enhanced to hear the meditative stroke of brush to paper.