Cantatatanz

An evening of Bach in a church setting

NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS are in the throes of putting together an evening that will use music, performance and a collage-like composition of sounds and images to explore the fascination that comes with being inside a church. The baroque musical artistry of Johann Sebastian Bach forms the basis for what promises to be a respectful yet inquisitive convergence of early music, song and the Navigators’ unique brand of visual language. The countertenor Terry Wey and the dancer Yui Kawaguchi, who have already wowed audiences in their performances as all-body poets in Anaesthesia, will investigate the unique atmosphere of the church together with the viola da gamba player Jakob David Rattinger, the violinist Mayumi Hirasaki and the harpsichord player Eugène Michelangeli. Each venue will bring with it new discoveries, with the performers approaching the individual space with imagination and a sense of reverence, creating moments that range from idiosyncratic humour to sensuous poetry.
Employing a sensitive theatrical language that incorporates instrumental music, song, dance, acrobatics and drama, NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS draw on the models of classical music to compose new sound and image landscapes that later reveal quite distinct ways of thinking to the audience. The working method of “guided improvisation” opens up a creative dialogue between the arts, the concerted interplay of which in the course of rehearsals is then condensed into a single evening in a series of tableaux.