MEDIATHEK

Don't Play! (2013) is a performance project developed in collaboration with the Dresden-based music ensemble El Perro Andaluz. It takes as subject the musicians’ biographies and work in the field of (new) music, investigating the `composition` of musical performance and ensemble practice. How can music be understood as a collaborative process occurring around scores, via the work of performers? What makes El Perro Andaluz distinct as an ensemble?

Working with the musicians as performers, the piece intermixes documentation, animation, and re-construction. It is intentionally a playful work, spirited by the individual personalities of the musicians. The concept for the piece was framed around the conceptual challenge to consider musicians in the act of sounding, without allowing the musicians to play a composed score: the paradox Don't Play! Research began by interviewing the musicians, to understand details of their relationship to their instruments, working process, insider jokes, and daily activities. The libretto was then developed from this source material by the Director, Jens Heitjohann.

Working collaboratively with choreographer Elizabeth Waterhouse, sound designer Max Schneider, and founding member of El Perro Andaluz, Lennart Dohms, the piece Don't Play! disrupts and textually contextualises modes of understanding musicality, and uses theatrical tools to problemetize the norms of musical perception. Music and musical instruments appear but never classically. Instead the performers construct instruments out of paper, enact their daily schedule as a foley and react to in-ear recordings. One piece of composed music is repeated three times in silence, under conditions of different interpretation. By giving the performers agency to discuss their daily activities outside the concert format, where norms of understanding are more fragile, Don't Play! is intended to enable reflection on the contemporary needs for seeing and hearing, and the relation of the individual performer, the ensemble, and the collective dispositiv of theatrical spectatorship. The German word `Klangkörper,` translated literally as `soundbody` becomes unexpectedly visible and audible.