Hidden Heartache

In the organizer's words:

A musical theater in body language

"Hidden Heartache" questions musical perception from a non-auditory perspective and thus focuses on the origin of movement. Between concert grand piano and dancing body, between vibration and gesture, sound occurs not only in the air, but also through vibrating bodies. Two deaf* and two hearing performers develop a web of visual rhythms in their movement. Music and dance are in a continuous process of mutual formation and realignment. When does dance become music and when does music become dance?

The production by the collective ox&öl in collaboration with the choreographer Lee Méir uses structure-borne sound transducers to make music physically tangible. The compositions by Ailís Ní Ríain and Julie Herndon - developed from a deaf and listening compositional perspective - unfold through the movements of the bodies. "Hidden Heartache" creates a shared experiential space in which listening appears as a physical experience and music reveals itself as a choreography of resonance.

* "Deaf" (with a capital letter when written) is the positive self-designation commonly used in Germany by non-hearing people - regardless of whether they are deaf, profoundly deaf or hard of hearing