Poznań’s Baroque Re:visions takes place in November and will feature a dance laboratory titled “Old Music – New Dance” and “Poznań Baroque,” which will present the most interesting orchestras associated with the Poznań early music scene from Poland and abroad.
“Old Music – New Dance”
November 4 – 27, 2011
This choreography laboratory will focus on a close analysis of the theoretical foundations of Baroque music (its incredible richness in terms of both form and composition) and the Baroque itself, in an attempt to determine its essence and convey it through dance. Young choreographers from Poland, Denmark, and Cyprus will attempt to translate the discoveries of Baroque artists into the language of contemporary choreography, stripping “Baroqueness” of its everyday — often negative — connotations, and uncovering its fascinating richness of structural solutions and eloquent use of emotion, as well as its effect on the audience. The purpose of these efforts will be to inspire similar solutions in contemporary choreography, to depart from the superficiality with which Baroque music is often treated in the context of contemporary dance.
The central element of the project will be a choreography workshop where young artists, with support from musicologists and playwrights, will focus on the analysis of select works of Baroque music and examine them in search of inspiration for specific choreographic solutions at the formal level as well as in the use of affects (to use a term from Baroque theory). Participants will strive to find a choreographic form in which the expression of emotion does not involve clichéd and overdone emotionality, in hopes of facilitating the return of emotion onto dance stages, whence they disappeared, rejected by the conceptual choreographers of the 1990s. The concept and the affect may thus find common ground through the Baroque.
Partners of the project: PELMA / Cyprus; Dansens Hus Oslo / Denmark.
“Poznań Baroque”
November 3–27, 2011
The festival will be devoted to early music in general, with special focus on Baroque music, and will encompass several independent styles of art and repertoire. Festival audiences will become acquainted with musicians and musical groups that have had a regular presence in Poznań and have made Poznań an important center for early music. Performing artists will include Arte dei Suonatori, the best Polish Baroque group of the past decade, Orchestra Libera Classica and Hidemi Suzuki, the leading Asian orchestra performing classical and romantic music on early instruments, Al Ayre Español and Eduardo López Banzo, whom classical music aficionados will remember for their sensational concerts and recordings in the 1990s, and the Holland Baroque Society, Holland’s most interesting young orchestra.
“Poznań Baroque” will also include a prestigious project called “Génération Baroque,” on of Europe’s top projects directed towards young musicians who are at the start of their professional early music careers. “Génération Baroque” was created on the initiative of French harpsichordist, organist, and conductor Martin Gester, and is a new form and name of a venture previously held for many years under the name “Studio du Parlement de Musique.”
“Génération Baroque” is a reference to the early music scene’s tradition of sharing experience “in the creative process,” instead of through the academic system. The project is intended for musicians from all over Europe.
