sound as stage event / stage event as sound
The Alternative Stage of the Greek National Opera and Gaudeamus joined forces to create a practice-based research platform, the goal of which was to exchange, develop, redesign and make accessible interdisciplinary tools and approaches towards music theatre and crossover performance.
The platform’s team consisted of artists from various backgrounds in the fields of music, theatre and dance. From the beginning of 2016 until the end of 2017, they had been working together as a collective, through online roundtables and workshops in Athens and Utrecht. The RE-FUSE team has been focusing on how creators and performers of different artistic fields can communicate within a creative, collaborative, interdisciplinary frame, with a special attention to borderline topics such as the musicality of speech.
This website hosts the documentation material of the team’s two-year-long activity: a selection of texts, videos, photos, opinions, reflections and programming code, from the very first online roundtable to the final presentations in Athens.
HIGHLIGHTS
Online Roundtable A
23-25 JAN 2016 | Internet
Thanasis Deligiannis and Efthimis Theou, together with the team’s programmer Kieran Klaassen devised a series of online roundtables so that the team could meet and work online from different countries, such as Greece, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and the US.
Workshop B
18-22 SEP 2016 | Greek National Opera Athens
For Workshop B the RE-FUSE team met in Athens in order to further explore materials and practices that were tested in the previous workshop. A question started forming among the team: does the research platform need to result in a performance, in order to test and design interdisciplinary tools?
Workshop C
23-27 MAY 2017 | Gaudeamus
Utrecht
After drastically narrowing down a large amount of material that had been generated throughout the last 16 months, the team met in Utrecht to address specific questions within the research’s context. Furthermore, this workshop served as a preparation for the platform’s public presentations that would follow in the autumn of 2017.
Presentations
4-7 SEP 2017 | Gaudeamus Music Week Utrecht
During Gaudeamus Music Week the RE-FUSE team shared with the audience the highlights of its research. The presentation had a hybrid format: an open discussion with the audience on their expectations around RE-FUSE and on what music theatre can be, and a tryout of the research's performative material. How to create a dialogue among all these disciplines? How to make the audience listen to what they watch and watch to what they listen to?
Educational Workshop
23-27 OCT 2017 | Greek National Opera Athens
GNO’s Learning and Participation Department invited four members of the RE-FUSE platform to design and implement a workshop for emerging Greek artists. A group of nine artists-participants from different disciplines worked intensely over a week. They were guided by the members of RE-FUSE, who shared with them the tools and practices that had been devised throughout the platform’s research.
Presentations
29 OCT - 3 NOV 2017 | Greek National Opera Athens
The RE-FUSE team concluded its activities by presenting a scenic documentary, summarizing the platform’s two-year-long operation. Two presentations took place at the Alternative Stage of the Greek National Opera, at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center.