2018 EMBRACE – ECHOLOT FESTIVAL FÜR NEUE MUSIK

EMBRACE!
Manuela Hartel – concept, performance, videomapping
Gunter Pretzel – viola, composition

Video music performance by Manuela Hartel for the ECHOLOT Festival für Neue Musik 2018. Performed on a natural stage between old trees in the park of Castle Kempfenhausen, Lake Starnberg.

By filigree video mapping on trees, leaves and grasses, emerges from the darkness, a kind of Wunderkammer that connects the nocturnal appeal of nature and the creative power of man. Between the trees hangs a bright hammock with unknown content that seems to glow red. A red veil, which hangs from a branch in the background to the soil and also the light, almost geometrically worked garment of the performer, are a projection surface. The spectators’ eyes wander over colorful lights like lanterns in treetops and iridescent patterns on trunks and grasses to a spinning ball. The figure waiting in the background and the seemingly moving hammock briefly form a unity. A lattice structure appears like a big dress, out of whose windows white creatures slip into the grass. The figure steps forward, plants are running along the tree trunks, a look over the shoulder – she pauses. Star Nebula opens, the figure disappears through a gate in the dark. What remains is the unknown person who hangs in a cloth between trees.

Music is composed by Gunter Pretzel. He mixes the recording “Moondike” with his delicate live playing on the viola, whose sounds disappear together with him, slowly in the darkness.