Reinventing the wheel

C_Music NOW

I dream that I am entering a room

– as if I had never been in one before –

and staging a musical theatre piece.

But perhaps we don’t need to call it that at all:

The world has only just been discovered

and we are looking for a vehicle to explore it

M.T.

“What would it mean,” Paul Klee once wondered, “to paint in the knowledge that no other brushstroke has ever been laid upon the world?”

In Reinventing the wheel, Manos Tsangaris takes up the echo of this question and sets out to reimagine that very same “impossible condition.” In the form of a lecture performance, he creates an on-site syntax of “voice, extraterritorial sounds, and video,” conjuring from nothing an intuitive musical world that reconciles the visible with the ineffable.

Composer, percussionist, poet, visual artist, current President of the Academy of Arts Berlin, and, in essence, a resident of an ever-expanding artistic cosmos, Tsangaris has been cultivating a distinctive form of musical theatre since the 1970s, in which the conditions of performance – and the ways they are perceived by the audience – constitute the very core of composition. In his capacity as a composer, he captures that elusive instant in which execution is transfigured into performance, and art hovers as a living reality before crystallising into a finished artefact (performance art). Sound, light, language, movement, theatrical action, visual and sculptural representation are all equal components within a practice that approaches composition not as a monumental work, but as a casual poetic event. The authorial presence steps back, the ties to fixed meanings loosen, and what comes to the fore is a continuous present that sustains the artist’s address to the memory of the spectator/listener and to historical time itself.

In this way, Reinventing the wheel becomes an action-hymn to personal “aha!” moments that articulate themselves out there in defiance of established artistic canons – a momentary and embodied theatre without narrative, and even more so without overt dramaturgical strategies. It is a tensile meditation that “listens” to our creative instincts and places unconditional trust in the fundamental materials of artistic creation. The wheel may not be invented anew, but it can certainly lead us to different places, time and again.