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In staging the choir Ghent Singers as a moving sculpture, Felix Kindermann's 'Choir Piece' questions our relationship with the term togetherness, mirroring today's Zeitgeist along with its societal distortions. Through rearrangement, fragmentation, and techniques of acoustic distortion, the work creates a feeling of alienation, destabilizing the interrelated appearance and effect of the choir as a familiar cultural asset, blurring the lines which are dissolved through the play with essential opposites like harmony and disharmony, the individual and the collective.

American composer Natalie Dietterich’s commissioned score 'Composition for Separated Musicians' applies Kindermann's far reaching intervention on the coherent structure of the ensemble, such that its harmony remains intact. Using Kindermann's text, her composition allows for a permanent spatial modulation of the singers, whilst staying connected via acoustic set pieces, despite their actual spatial modulation. As the sound of the voices fills the volume of the unique locations, German choreographer Florian Fischer translates the themes of separation and connection into movements that play out over the entire exhibition space.

This work premiered in the Dhondt-Daenens Museum in Deurle in 2019, and was subsequently performed in S.M.A.K. Gent, KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels and KIT Cafe in Düsseldorf. 

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Felix Kindermann , concept and text  |  Natalie Dietterich , composer  

Florian Fischer, choreographer | Ivan Yohan, conductor