MEDIATHEK

“Bad Weather” is a performative sound art event centered around baroque theatre noise machines that have interested Arturas Bumšteinas – the author of the idea of the work – since 2012. Together with a professional theatre carpenter he has recreated wind, rain, sea and thunder imitation devices, identical to the ones whose canon settled in European theatres over the 17th century. In the Baroque era, noise machines constituted a small part of the whole theatrical illusion – the one invisible to the eye of the viewer, with its positions at the theatre‘s wings and behind the scene.  
 
 In “Bad Weather”, noise machines are generators of conceptual “climate”, but like any other man-made mechanism, the wind machine is not a self-operating perpetuum mobile: its spontaneity is influenced by human muscle tension and his / her creative will. The ensemble of performers remains coordinated by having replaced musical notes or choreographic instructions with weather charts from various centuries, as well as their decontextualized fragments, to organize the dynamics of the work and metaphorically “set to rotation” the wheel of natural phenomena and its simulation. Performance artist Ivan Cheng has written a specific performative text, which forecasts the topics that have influenced the creative process.  
 
 Each version of “Bad Weather” is always a little different. And what about the singing voice? The aria is floating around in the surround-sound space, looking for the body to pin to.