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Navarasa. John Cage

26.10 Sun 19:00

30 PLN

Gościnnie / Lab / Koncert

A con­cert-instal­la­tion fea­tur­ing the com­plete Sonatas and Inter­ludes by John Cage for pre­pared piano (1946–48). The music draws on the Indi­an con­cept of art based on nine emo­tions: love/sensuality, power/courage, anger/fury/rage, disgust/horror, joy/irony, compassion/sorrow, wonder/delight, fear/dread, and serenity/calm.

The sound of the instru­ment has been mod­i­fied by plac­ing nails, screws, pieces of rub­ber and plas­tic between the strings. The result is a unique bridge in music his­to­ry between West­ern and East­ern art, and an equal­ly unique piano sound.

In the inter­pre­ta­tion by Mar­ty­na Zakrzews­ka and Alek­san­dra Ołdak, music meets image through hybrid visu­als com­bin­ing live-cap­tured video from the per­for­mance with 3D ren­ders. The cen­tral motif of the three-dimen­sion­al ani­ma­tions is a wind sim­u­la­tion — a vari­able, gen­er­a­tive force act­ing on dig­i­tal objects like an unreg­u­lat­ed impulse. As in Cage’s own con­cepts, chance and open­ness of process become com­po­si­tion­al strate­gies. The image does not so much illus­trate the sound as func­tion as a par­al­lel, autonomous lay­er of presence.

The space will be arranged to encour­age indi­vid­ual recep­tion and con­tem­pla­tion — vis­i­tors may lie on mats, walk around, or sit.

Programme:

John Cage Sonatas and Inter­ludes for pre­pared piano*

*world pre­miere

Performers:

Mar­ty­na Zakrzews­ka piano

Production:

Alek­san­dra Ołdak visu­als
pro­gramme con­cept and text: 

Alek­san­dra Ołdak, Mar­ty­na Zakrzews­ka                
pro­duc­tion: Aga­ta Krys­tek, Olga Pasek
visu­al iden­ti­ty: Alek­san­dra Ołdak

This project is realised with funds from the “Cre­ative Schol­ar­ship of the City of Kraków”.

The project received a schol­ar­ship from the Cre­ative Fund of the Authors’ Asso­ci­a­tion ZAiKS.

Hash­tag Lab Con­tem­po­rary Music Space is co-fund­ed by the City of War­saw.
The media patron of the Hash­tag Lab Con­tem­po­rary Music Space is POLMIC​.PL.

If you’d like to know more about the artists:

Mar­ty­na Zakrzews­ka is a pianist, soloist and cham­ber musi­cian devot­ed to music of the 20th and 21st cen­turies, a doc­tor of arts and a teacher. She won a spe­cial prize at the X Com­pe­ti­tion of 20th and 21st Cen­tu­ry Music for Young Per­form­ers in Radziejow­ice, and sec­ond prize at the 23rd Con­cor­so Lui­gi Nono. She holds schol­ar­ships from the Min­istry of Cul­ture and Nation­al Her­itage and from the May­or of Kraków. She has per­formed at the Music Uni­ver­si­ty in Graz, WDR, Deutsch­land­funk, Uni­ver­sität der Kün­ste in Berlin, the Lviv Phil­har­mon­ic, the Świę­tokrzys­ka Phil­har­mon­ic, the Witold Lutosławs­ki Stu­dio of Pol­ish Radio, and with the Nation­al Pol­ish Radio Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra (NOSPR). She has appeared at fes­ti­vals includ­ing Wien Mod­ern, Acht Brück­en, Warsza­wska Jesień, Łańcuch, Sacrum Pro­fanum, unsound, and TRZY-CZTE-RY. She has giv­en world pre­mieres of works by Zyg­munt Krauze, Artur Zaga­jew­s­ki, Cezary Duch­nows­ki, and Joan­na Woźny. She has active­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in impuls Acad­e­my, EWCM, Inter­na­tionale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Ostra­va Days, Stock­hausen-kurse Kürten, and cours­es run by Ensem­ble Musik­fab­rik and Ensem­ble Mod­ern. Since 2019 she has taught at her home acad­e­my in Kraków; since 2022 she has been a lec­tur­er at the Sum­mer Cours­es in New Music for Per­form­ers in Bydgoszcz. 

Alek­san­dra Ołdak (1990) is a visu­al artist work­ing at the inter­sec­tion of dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal media. Her prac­tice encom­pass­es gen­er­a­tive video, 3D ren­ders, objects and instal­la­tions, focus­ing on build­ing para­met­ric spaces and explor­ing the rela­tion­ships between move­ment, sound and form. She cre­ates visu­al frame­works for con­certs and per­for­mances, exper­i­ment­ing with the inte­gra­tion of image and music. Her work has been pre­sent­ed at Warsza­wska Jesień, KODY: Fes­ti­val of Tra­di­tion and Musi­cal Avant-Garde in Lublin, NeoArte – Syn­teza­tor Sztuk in Gdańsk, Sacrum Pro­fanum in Kraków, DEMO Fes­ti­val in the Nether­lands, and Daegu Con­tem­po­rary Music Fes­ti­val in South Korea. She is a grad­u­ate of the Fac­ul­ty of Graph­ic Arts at the Acad­e­my of Fine Arts in War­saw, where she received a mas­ter’s degree from the Depart­ment of Con­cep­tu­al and Inter­me­dia Graph­ic Arts. In her work she oper­ates in the field of spec­u­la­tive visu­al­i­ty, inves­ti­gat­ing the bound­aries between sim­u­la­tion and matter.

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