The Collective
Sounding Situations
Sounding Situations develops highly innovative music theater where the performers and musicians, the auditive and the audience meet in both physical and imaginary space for artistic action. Their projects create moments where political art, current questions of our society, reality, utopia, and artistic magic merge into a multilayered artwork.
Often the group works between countries, continents, and cultural boundaries in trans-traditional experiments hence overcoming challenges and revealing the beauty of our shared human existence.
Since 2014 the collective explores theatrical situations between theater, staging and music. Live processing of original musical material, instruments, field recordings and language sounds are connected to a unique composition. The work always looks for a strong relation to the environment in its material, acoustic and political context. Collaborations range from musicians to choreographers, visual artists, authors, theater and film directors.
The long term work brought the group presented their projects at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Kampnagel Hamburg, Humboldt Forum and performed in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Canada, Brasil, Denmark, Israel and Rwanda and other places around the world.
Milena Kipfmüller was born and grew in Brazil, where she studied oboe and piano. After moving to Germany she decided to continue her studies at the faculty of applied theatre studies in Giesen with Heiner Goebbels, Xavier Le Roy,
Mathilde Monnier, Antonio Araújo and where she focused on sound, radioplays and dramaturgical work. Her works blend different media together and approach often political and current questions. She was scholarship holder on the program for young European artists, curators and
producers (Festival in Transition). Her radioplay “Hate Radio” about the Rwandan genocide won the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden 2014. She got a fellowship of Robert Bosch Stiftung and collaborated with groups such as matthaei&konsorten, Gob Squad, was founding member of sounding situations and IIPM. // www.milenakipf.de //
Klaus Janek combines the doublebassplaying with electronics as compositional tools. He collaborates extensively with movement, spoken words and music theater, seeking the balance between aesthetics and discourse. He performed at the Louvre, Berghain, CTM, Impulstanz and many other places and festivals, tours regularly in all continents, earned a scholarship from Robert Bosch Stiftung and grants from culture exchange office Berlin and culture office, Bolzano. – // www.klaus-janek.de //
Jens Dietrich works as curator and freelance dramaturge. He studied Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen under the director and composer Heiner Goebbels. During and after his studies, he worked at Richard Foreman’s Ontological Theater in New York as well as at the Bühnen der Stadt Köln and the Theater Freiburg. Since 2004 he is active in various international collaborations. 2009 he joined the International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM). 2014 he founded the group “Political Bodies” together with Yolanda Gutiérrez. He curated the Russian Performing Arts section of the Nordwind Festival 2015. In 2016 he joined Sounding Situations and co-directed the audio play “Kunst im Verhör” (WDR) together with Milena Kipfmüller and the walkable music theatre “Rwandan Records”, which premiered at the HKW Berlin in 2019. – // www.jens-dietrich.com //
Fabia Mekus is a cultural manager and completed her bachelor’s degree in ethnology and educational science at the University of Cologne. In this context, she has primarily dealt with the topics of feminism and postcolonialism. In the master’s degree in cultural management and cultural education at the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, her core interests included various management and marketing strategies for the cultural sector, and above all cultural-political and cultural-sociological topics. Fabia is involved in various cultural projects in Cologne and Hamburg as production manager, including the Sommerblut Kulturfestival eV, the Cologne Institute for Culture and Education, the performance collective Performing Females and the Grenz sind relativ eV. In addition, she has been working as a fundraiser for various artists, associations and collectives since 2017. In her work, she focuses on socio-political issues, sustainable working methods and collective ways of work and creation. In 2019 she joined Sounding Situations covering the fields of production management and co-thinking.
Collaborators
1key is a multilingual poet, actor, musician, songwriter, producer from East Africa merging various forms of media in his artistic expressions. http://1keyziki.com/
The percussionist Sofia Borges chose a risky but stimulating path: to explore, to experiment, to enlarge the established languages (be it the improvised ones or the composed by herself, with graphic notations extending the conventional writing) and the results are showing us that the art of sounds is not dead yet; far from it. She does it in two ways. One is the solo format – adding objects, some of them of her own invention, music boxes and toys to the jazz drumkit and the orchestral percussion instruments, and also analogic and digital electronic devices enabling her to process, in real time, her acoustic constructions, including in the mix a good number of field recordings. Another is the association with some of the most remarkable spontaneous noisemakers of our time, like Craig Taborn, Mat Maneri, Axel Dörner, Robyn Schulkowsky, Ignaz Schick, Ryeko Okuda, Sanem Kalfa, Michael Thieke, Cansu Tanrikulu, Chris Pitsiokos e Nick Dunston, just to name a few, and integrating unavoidable bands such as SORBD and SLOTSCH.
The Berlin-based, but Portuguese-born inventive sound creator has the stage as her natural environment, establishing music as another of the performative arts. In this context it’s with no wonder that we find Sofia Borges in dance and theatre projects, collaborating with Meg Stuart, Alexis Blake or the collective Sounding Situations. There’s no end in sight for the investigative approaches of her playing with time and space, and that’s the key secret for her growing notability in the international scene.
The Berlin-based clarinetist/composer/performer Michael Thieke is equally at home across a broad range of musical environments, such as experimental song forms, collectively composing projects, improvising collectives, and music on the fringes of jazz. He is exploring the minutiae of sound, timbre and noise, with a particular interest in microtonality and related sound phenomena. The qualities of slowness are another field of his research. He has a preference for long-term collaborations and collective work.
Some of his current Projects are: The International Nothing (with Kai Fagaschinski), Voutchkova/Thieke Duo (with Biliana Voutchkova), The Pitch (with Boris Baltschun, Koen Nutters, Morten J. Olsen), Der lange Schatten (with Håvard Wiik, Antonio Borghini), Splitter Orchester, Magda Mayas Filamental (with Magda Mayas, Angharad Davies, Christine Abdelnour, Zeena Parkins, Rhodri Davies, Aimee Theriot, Anthea Caddy), Porta Chiusa (with Paed Conca, Hans Koch), The Clarinet Trio (with Gebhard Ullmann, Jürgen Kupke), The Magic I.D. (with Christof Kurzmann, Kai Fagaschinski, Margareth Kammerer), Marino/Thieke (wth Luigi Marino), Nashaz (with Sharif Sehnaoui, Andrea Neumann, Michael Vorfeld), Warteland (with Lena Czerniawska, Emilio Gordoa)
He played on festivals such as Novas Frequencias (Rio de Janeiro), Borderline (Athens), Ring Ring (Belgrade), Wien Modern, Uppercut (Bordeaux), Klub Katarakt (Hamburg), Irtijal (Beirut), Ftarri Festival (Tokyo), Meakusma (Eupen), Seanaps (Leipzig), Festival International de Musique Actuelle (Victoriaville), Taiwan Improvised Music Festival (Tapei), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Musikprotokoll (Graz), Klangspuren (Schwaz), Trans Art (Bozen), Music Unlimited (Wels), Jazz Fest (Berlin), MärzMusik (Berlin), Borealis (Bergen), Musica Estranha (Sao Paulo), ctm (Berlin), Crak (Paris), Darmstädter Ferienkurse Für Neue Musik (Darmstadt), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), Taktlos (Zürich), Metéo (Mulhouse), Angelica (Bologna), Alternativa (Prague), Konfrontationen (Nickelsdorf), Musiques Innovatrices (St.Etienne), artacts (St.Johann), Experimental Intermedia (New York), Long Arms (Moscow), Controindicazione (Rome), Moers Festival, Donaueschinger Musiktage, ZJFT (Groningen), Jazz em Agosto (Lisbon), PiedNu (LeHavre)
Josué Mugisha was born in Burundi and is an actor, dancer-choreographer, director and playwright.
After studying performing arts in South Africa, Josué encountered what he calls a „speech crisis“ in Burundi, a term that comes from the fact that people were whispering about political issues because everyone was suspicious of everyone else, that artists were very censored and threatened, that all independent radio stations were burned, etc…
Joshua then began to research other ways of communicating with the public and found a lot of potential in the virtuosity of the bodies through the creation of conceptual images that return reason to the individual through a free, abstract and poetic reading.
GROTEST MARU was founded in 1996 at Kunsthaus KuLe in the centre of Berlin, where it was based until 2018. Since 2019 the company is located at Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin Kreuzberg. The company has been touring internationally with its productions since 1999, often supported by the Goethe Institute.
GROTEST MARU specialises in developing site specific projects for different situations, architectural spaces or landscapes. Through workshop programmes local artists and community groups can be integrated into bigger productions.
GROTEST MARU explores forms of communication that cross cultural borders. As a network of international artists with diverse cultural and artistic backgrounds, the company creates an universal image-based theatrical language, mostly without words, that can be understood worldwide. https://www.grotestmaru.de/
Led by 3 associated artists – Stéphanie Mangez, Emmanuel De Candido, Olivier Lenel – the Compagnie MAPS is a theatrical creation collective resolutely focused on social issues and new writing.
In addition to its shows, since 2012 the Compagnie MAPS has also set up public readings, writing residencies, as well as support for artists in creation and authors. It seeks to promote artistic projects realized in new contexts through its „creative ecosystem“ for which the MAPS Company is the winner of the JUMELLES D’OR SACD 2023 Prize.
Artist; composer / sound designer; lighting designer for theatre, dance and circus; technical manager for devised theatre; field recordist; concert / event organiser; mail art curator; radio presenter and DJ: operating in various fields of art and performance since the mid-1980’s; born in Cardiff, Wales.
Co-artistic director with Paul Hodson (The Future Is Unwritten) of Theatre FC, creating theatre events for & with non-league football clubs and their supporters; technical manager / lighting designer for Gob Squad, the Berlin-based multi-media theatre company; technical consultant / lighting & sound designer for artistic director / choreographer Andreas Wegwerth (formally of Residance of the Peter Gläsel Stiftung); lighting & sound designer for UK theatre companies Prodigal / UPG and The Future Is Unwritten; and band member of Animal Magic; LuTz and Wevie Stonder.
Has previously worked with Matthaei & Konsorten; Jens Dietrich & Milena Kipfmueller & SNDNG STTNS; Milo Rau / IIPM; Royston Maldoom; Tanzmoto; Katja Dreyer; Darren Johnston / Array; Liz Aggiss; Divas Dance Theatre; Periplum; Tim Crouch; Slot Machine; Silvia Mercurali; Sarah Nicolls; Talia Randall; Tchekpo Dance Company; The Ragroof Players; Inspector Sands; Vincent Dance Theatre; Matilda Leyser & John-Paul Zaccarini; Bright FX; Swamp Circus; The People Show & The Royal Shakespeare Company.
Katharina Meves studied at SEAD, Salzburg and was a recipient of the DanceWEB scholarship 2009. In Austria she has performed with Georg Blaschke and Liquid Loft/Chris Haring, e.g. in the Posing Project B – The Art of Seduction, which was awarded the Golden Lion at the Biennale di Venezia 2007. She also acted in the film Burning Palace by Mara Mattuschka and Chris Haring, which received the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen Prize in 2009. In Germany, she has worked e.g. with Lara Kugelmann, Ingo Reulecke, Lukas Matthaei, Lubricat, Ayat Najafi, Louise Wagner and Anna Malunat. She has also been dancing with the T.r.a.s.h. Dance Company in the Netherlands since 2011.
The Italian-German duo TÒ SU explores transcultural border areas in a global world and deals with Eurocentric perspectives and their own cultural identity. Projects are created in collaboration with experts from art, science and everyday life and are mostly characterized by analogue and digital interactivity, which invite the audience to participate. TÒ SU comes from the Rhaeto-Romanic language, which is spoken by a small community in northen Italy and means “to record, to document, to include”. In Ladin, the two short words form the meaning that arises in interaction and mutual exchange. Prinoth and Mahlknecht combine the two genres of documentary film and theater. In the past, various collaborations have resulted in projects that are hybrids of both genres and have been presented in cinemas, theaters and exhibition spaces. They produce their projects between several countries with a focus on Germany and Italy.
Martina Mahlknecht was born in Bressanone, Italy. She lives and works between Bolzano and Hamburg, Germany. She studied art and stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts HfbK in Hamburg and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. Since 2022 she is teaching at the HfbK Hamburg.
Martin Prinoth was born in Rhaeto-Romanic Urtijëi, Italy. He lives between Bolzano and Hamburg. After studying communication sciences at the University of Salzburg, Austria he graduated in film and digital cinema at the Academy of Fine Arts HfbK in Hamburg. He leads film workshops and film seminars i.a. at the UE Hamburg.
SUPPORT & Funding
Since 2014 Sounding Situation has been supported within several projects by Kulturbehörde Hamburg, Senat für Kulturelle Anglegenheiten Berlin, Goethe Institut, Kulturstiftung des Bunde, Fonds Darstellende Künste, Humboldt Forum