A concert with a choreographed tail
The Urban Tale of a Hippo is a musical work that explores the landscape of modernity and considers the identity of man and animal.
The venue - Dūmū fabrikas - here becomes not only a stage, but also acts as a musical instrument, where sounds spread, change, grow and surround the audience. Viewers, while navigating the fog, can not only admire the landscape here, but also immerse themselves in it, hide from other eyes. Like hunters who rely on their sensitized senses to wander through space.
The sound environment created by The Urban Tale of a Hippo combines live instruments and electronic music, reflecting the acoustic landscape of nature and the city. At the same time, it is a map of the fading visions of the past and the silhouettes of the future that are still only felt.
In this performance, the material world looms like a gigantic behemoth, a totem of awareness and multiplicity. Finally, the hippopotamus himself emerges.
Critical Feedback:
It is interesting how creators in a completely urban space, using sounds, smoke, lights, recreate a nature that is more real than what you hear and experience on a darkened summer evening somewhere, in the meadow of a distant village. <…> The viewer is allowed to enter this mystical space.
Ugnė Kačkauskaitė, menufaktura.lt
"The Urban Tale of a Hippo" - it seemed to me rather not a concert, even with a tail, but a musical event, full of life, because you go on a journey. <…> Here the senses are active, alert, employed at full capacity. Neither the space nor the sound images form specific meanings, they do not penetrate a strictly encoded semiotic field, but rather encourage an intuitive and extremely subjective journey through the work.
Rima Jūraitė, Krantai
The idea spreading in the fog simply allowed planned and improvised sounds, gestures, flashes of light to take place... Ephemerality turned the viewer into a hedgehog [fog], hovering around the blowing mountains of plastic; at intervals marveling at the animalistic movements of the performers; sitting down from time to time to listen to the spatial sound panorama.
Jurgis Kubilius, laureate of the Laboratory of Young Art Analysts
Authors about the work:
The music of The Urban Tale of a Hippo is inspired by the texts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially the essay "Becoming an Animal" and the work "A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia". Here the authors distinguish three types of animals: the first is the oedipal animal, which is individualized and sentient; the second is a Jungian or archetypal animal found in the mythology and spiritual practices of various nations; the third is a demonic animal that is intangible and operates subconsciously. Each scroll in the piece relates to one of these three animal types and is based on the following criteria: anti-hierarchy; multidirectional development, without separating the center and the periphery; has no beginning, middle and end; does not have a dominant attitude.
Composer Panayiotis Kokors
The main challenge is how to choreograph an immersive listening experience for the audience and at the same time turn the audience into a choreographic subject. The choreography gives space and focus to the music, not trying to embellish it, illustrate it, overshadow or emphasize the narratives encoded in The Urban Tale of a Hippo. By working and thinking in straight lines and at the same time with multi-meaning choreographic means, this piece aims to escape from choreography as a performance, rather to convey it as an event. We do not offer one dominant approach, but try to allow each viewer/listener to find ways to relate to the unfolding (non)human choreography.
Choreographer Andrius Katinas
When the fog fills the space, the light is reflected everywhere and loses its clear direction and purpose, it does not indicate where to look and what to see. The width of the human eye's clear vision is only 2°, the rest of the nearly 360° field remains blurred. Although vision in this field is not very sensitive to details, it is able to detect changes and movement. Therefore, when immersed in the fog, the image loses the hierarchy of objects, one has to rely on their barely visible traces. The field of view has neither foreground nor background. All that remains are many clues. This is why spatial lighting should not be equated with lighting design to create a background or atmosphere. Light does not show space, but creates it, gives it to something else.
Light artist Nanni Vapaavuori
Instrumental parts are deconstructed and unexpectedly sound with animal or other environmental sounds. In this musical performance, the composer reveals a unique ability to combine instrumental material, which requires particularly skilled musicians, and electronics. This requires extremely attentive listening and quick reaction from the musicians, while leaving room for the interpretation that is born in the "here and now".
Marta Finkelštein, head of the Synaesthesis ensemble
The costumes are dominated by rough silhouettes. Illustrative, complete characters are not created here, but on the contrary, a new, authentic form for each performer (and his actions) is aimed for, which emerges in space in its own way. Monochrome costumes vary between covered and exposed surfaces, as if affected by the atmosphere, various fabric manipulation techniques are used, leaving the impression of incompleteness, like traces.
Costume designer Morta Nakaitė
