Mondstuk (2005)

Mondstuk is a sounding choreography for three performers each playing a headpiece of a tenor recorder. The instrument is reduced to a primitive object, a hollow tube with three openings that the performers blow or play with their hands in the most diverse ways. The three performers sit frontally in a row and simultaneously demonstrate different sound possibilities and playing positions in a game of rhythmic contrasts, variations and imitations. The musicians’ movements are visually imagined from a flat plane, with the frontal view of the body postures and headpiece positions reflecting the graphic notation in the score.

Mondstuk embodies a personal fascination with the relationship between composition and choreography that I thematised in the early 2000s into compositions in which both movement and sound result were notated as precisely as possible. My attitude to these works today is ambivalent, mainly because the precision required leaves the performers little room for interpretation. Mondstuk is therefore conceived not primarily as a concert piece, but as an audiovisual composition in which ideally one and the same performer takes care of all three parts, as partly realised in a video montage with Tomma Wessel in 2010.

Excerpt from the second part (performer: Tomma Wessel):