KABK IST Research Lab SOUNDSCAPE 2018/2019
KABK & KONCON students participating in the KABK IST Research Lab SOUNDSCAPE 2018/2019 present the results of their unique collaboration with presentations of scenographic designs and compositions for 4 different acts on Wednesday 16 January at 15:00 in the KABK auditorium.
This mixed media opera: A Paradise Built in Hell, challenges the traditional concept of the dramatic opera format as we know it today. It opens up the opportunity for students to experiments with alternative narrative structures, unconventional produced music (and musicians) and suggests a scenography that mimics ‘the real’ while it no longer differs from your couch-perspective; a videogame. It plays with interactive transmissions and invites you to a (virtual)-reality-walk through... Paradise? Hell?
Presentation of scenographic designs
Background of conceptual framework:
Gert Dumbar en Studio Van ’t Hullenaar & Vis worked with KABK & KONCON students for 4 months reinventing the idea of the opera. Opera is a format that strongly magnifies situations that you can recognise from reality and it is exactly with this aspect of the magnifying glass that students have look at and translated this dramatic concept A Paradise Built in Hell - after the book of social critic Rebecca Solnit; whom describes the purposeful joy that fills human beings in the face of disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes and even a terrorist attack:
“These are clearly not events to be wished for, yet they bring out the best in us and provide common purpose. Everyday concerns and societal structures vanish. A strange kind of liberation fills the air. People rise to the occasion. Social alienation seems to vanish. Our response to disaster gives us nothing less than “a glimpse of who else we ourselves may be and what else our society could become... The recovery of this purpose and closeness without crisis or pressure is the great contemporary task of being human.”
A Paradise Built in Hell, will be performed live by ensemble Klang at the Korzo Theater on the 2nd of April.
About the KABK IST Research Lab SOUNDSCAPE
The Research Lab SOUNDSCAPE is one of the research labs organised within the context of the
