Avenue Azure | Hollands Collectief | Visio Koor – Lightness

Avenue Azure | Hollands Collectief | Visio Koor – Lightness

Location: De SCHUUR – Haarlem

LIGHTNESS (Festival commission, worldpremiere)

Lightness is a concert with stories, music, spoken and sung text. It explores sensory perception by verbally describing visual experiences and translating colours into music. What does ‘red’ sound like? How do you describe ‘green’ without seeing it? And how do we experience art, music and choral singing as a collective while our individual experiences remain unique?

The performance is inspired by a special moment in art history: in October 1907, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke visited an exhibition of works by Paul Cézanne. In letters to his wife, he described his sensory experiences of the paintings – not only as love letters to her, but also as an ode to Cézanne’s art. The list of Cezanne’s works shown at this exhibition have been largely lost, and Rilke’s descriptions therefore form a speculative, if not virtual, poetic catalogue of what might have been exhibited. At the same time, those words are the only image we have of the exhibition.

Lightness is a commission by The Big Sing, in co-production with the Ensemble Klang Foundation, and brings together a new composition by Pete Harden with texts by Rilke. The performance is a contemporary reflection on sensory experiences. In a dark setting, the performance aims to evoke abstract colours, textures and landscapes. The dramaturgy and text are provided by Avenue Azure and Belgian writer Tomas Serrien, who has researched the perception of music by people with sensory impairments. He wrote about this in his book Klank: een filosofie van de muzikale ervaring (Sound: a philosophy of the musical experience).