Musical Utopias 6 | The Art of Doing Nothing

Musical Utopias is Ensemble Klang and the Korzo’s annual festival that brings together music-makers and artists from multiple disciplines all striving to build new worlds. It is an invitation to share in a hopeful journey into the unknown, a journey that looks optimistically to the future.

This year the performances revolve around the theme of losing control. Works in which control has been relaxed or relinquished in order to uncover new and unexpected environments. Which new worlds, atmospheres and structures can you discover if you dare to take a step back, to lean away completely? The works explore how it feels to stand still, to press pause, so that you can continue forward on newly uncovered avenues.

20.15-21.15 (Grote Zaal) – Stephanie Pan & Ensemble Klang ‘The Art of Doing Nothing’ – world premiere
22.15-23.00 (Grote Zaal) – Ela Orleans ‘Night Voyager’

Stephanie Pan and Ensemble Klang open festival Musical Utopias with The Art of Doing Nothing, a feminist manifesto about listening to yourself. About standing still. Don’t always swim against the current, but sometimes just let yourself be carried on the waves. And then make conscious choices.

To hold back, only to burst out with full force. The Art of Doing Nothing celebrates soft feminine qualities such as doubt and vulnerability. It motivates to let go and embrace the magical space of not knowing.

Together with Ensemble Klang, Stephanie Pan takes you on a sonic journey through distilled silence, soothing landscapes, pounding and gritty beats and dramatic vocals.

Ela Orleans – Night Voyager
Set to soaring music featuring live synthesiser, theremin and violin, footage of the 1969 Apollo moon mission is repurposed to retell the narrative of Night Thoughts, a nine-poem cycle written by Edward Young in the 1740s. Night Voyager marries visuals from the NASA archives, capturing fearful but optimistic astronauts and their anxious loved ones left at home, with Young’s meditation on death – and speaks, too, of the possibility of cultural forgetting, as in Young’s poem, now scarcely remembered but called in its time “the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced”.