DESCRIPTION:
freie radikale -- free radicals
dance music poetry performance at essl museum klosterneuburg/vienna
18.4.2012

elisabeth flunger -- percussion
susanna gartmayer -- bass & contra-alto clarinet
sabina holzer -- dance & voice
emmanuelle pellegrini -- poetry & voice

video: andreas rottenschlager & elisabeth flunger

thanks to ministère de la culture luxembourg for the support, and to kanon uchihashi for her spontaneous participation.

free radicals are looking for the typical and the archetypical in their work as artists and performers, as well as in their lifes.
they borrow behaviours, speech and movement samples from their everyday life and personal history and use them as a material for improvisation. they deal with real and imaginary folk dance and folk music, and they invoke clichés from ancient traditional customs and contemporary conventions.

elisabeth flunger is working with trash objects, relicts from an utopian past where the junk was still an undamaged component of usage, and music was still comfortable and predictable. thus, in her obsessive motion sequences always appear elements who remind songs, dance rhythms and nursery rhymes.

susanna gartmayer is in search for the anti-individualistic aspects of music who connect people and give them an identity. kitsch, melodic sentiment and emotional excess in her world are expression of the desire for comfort and security, of the longing to be part of a greater wohle, as well as they represent childhood memories and can be the materials for an ambiguous play.

sabina holzer perceives her body as an everyday body. ordinary activities like sitting, standing, lying and walking let her dream of something other, of festive verve and splendor, of gestures, rotations and steps like dancing.

emmanuelle pellegrini likes to share her memories, thoughts and feelings with others and to perform them in improvised poems, and she likes also to emphasize single words, to take them out of context until they get a new meaning.

the performers use the whole venue as performance space.
they move through the space, in order to join changing formations -- duos, trios, quartets. there is no center, the focus is shifting again and again: where there was nothing, something new begins; and what subsisted for a while, disappeares or becomes part of something else.