Connecting Arts invites you to participate!
This year, Connecting Arts invites the members of the European Festivals Association and all other interested parties in Europe to participate in this unique and inspiring interdisciplinary festival.
We offer you, being a festival, concert hall, theatre or other organisation, to programme one (or more) of our original and (new)
Connecting Arts productions in your own country! These productions are characterised by professionalism, creativity, diversity and innovation. To see our productions, please scroll down.
How?
By contacting us and discuss the right production for your own venue with us. You pay a fee and additional expenses for travel, lodging and equipment only. The preparation expenses have already been made which means lower costs to you!
Are you interested in our performances, the artists and other practical information? Please contact us by sending an email or call us! More information about the festival can be found at www.connectingarts.org.
N.B. Connecting Arts does not ask for a commission. We connect you as an organisation/programmer directly to the artists.
Contact
Natalie Haakman - Assistant to the Managing Director
Email:
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Phone: +31 (0) 6 43 55 78 58
P.O. Box 135, 1000 AC Amsterdam - the Netherlands
Nemo, 20.000 leagues under the sea (NL) - organ and theatre
Theatre Company “De Plaats” from Arnhem (Netherlands) has created a music-theatre performance in co-production with Connecting Arts in which a journey of 20.000 miles far away is staged with a light-hearted imagination.
Captain NEMO is a visionar who is always dreaming about a new journey to the unknown. Accompanied by a ship-boy and a cook, who vaguely resemble his son and his wife, one day Nemo plunges into the deep, the infinitely deep. So deep, that it seems that he has gone straight through the bottom of the ocean until he has reached the highest regions of the universe. And then, like a shooting star through the Milky Way, he returns home unharmed. His journey seemed to be infinite, or was it a day, an hour?
Duration: 60 min | Elske te Lindert, organ and voice | Theatre Company “De Plaats” |
Letters from the war front (FR) - organ and theatre
A musical story with light projections
One century ago, in 1911, Jéhan Alain was born. He was a great musician, who’s genius was recognised by no one less than Olivier Messiaen, the most important composer of the 20th century. Unfortunately he died already in 1949, leaving behind a young family and a unique musical oeuvre and a large amount of letters. The well known French actress Brigitte Fossey (appearing in movies from and with Gene Kelly, Francois Truffaut and Paul Newman), made a selection from the letters that he wrote from the army in the first few month of World War II. This has been the inspiration for this performance, with light, tape, an important contribution from the actress and the beautiful organ music that Jéhan wrote.
Duration: 60 min | Michel Bouvard, organ | Brigitte Fossey, actress |
Folk & Bach (SE) – folk music and organ
A large pipe organ - with seemingly endless possibilities for producing sounds, colours, and moods - and a nyckelharpa, a truly traditional Swedish folk instrument. Two of Swedish foremost conjurers of these instruments come together in a wild but tender dance, where earth meets sky, the ancient meets the brand new, and where hardship meets joy.
The nyckelharpa player Johan Hedin and organ virtuoso Gunnar Idenstam play their innovative mixture of traditional Swedish folk tunes and newly written material.
Their music is rooted in Swedish folk music but feels brand new – it twists and turns along mysterious paths, dresses up in symphonic clothing, invokes sacred moods, swirls about in danceable polskas and sings its lyrical melodies. In summary, it is an invitation into a fantastic new world, a world where also Bach, is invited.
Duration: 70 min | Gunnar Idenstam, organ | Johan Hedin, nyckelharpa |
Myrrh (DK) – theater, video/light art, dance and organ
A musical, architectural and theatrical meditation
Five different musical compositions of César Franck, Händel en Gorecki, are accompanied by five visualizations of the music by mime and acting..
Let us imagine that miraculous incidents happen all the time to all people; only we simply do not pay attention to them. Let for a short while the irrationality be dominant, and let the music reign in an inexplicable miraculous world - a world, where a mother, a son and an angel form the pivot of a musical and visual scenery. Through the idea of contemplation, the stageing tries to divert the attention from the common actions of daily-life, the dominance of the words and the logical sense of reality.
Duration: 60 min | Thomas Hejlesen, concept and direction | Klaudia Kidon, soprano | Lars Sømod, organ | Svend Bunch, dance and performance| Ninna Steen, dance, performance and video design | Alexander Schwenn, light design |
Organic Dialogue (SE) – an audiovisual installation
The breath as source of creation is an idea to be found in many religious traditions. The Wondrous Machine, the organ, could then be seen as manmade technology trying to canalize divine breath.
In this installation, the raw materials of organ sound, wood and metal for the physical, breath for the spiritual, are transformed into an immersive audiovisual environment. The audience can then experience the organ as an artefact produced by man in order to praise the creator. In a movement of longing and love, to establish a two-way relationship between man and creator, man attempts to reproduce divine creation and control divine energy, the breath. The installation consists of video projections and several metres of white-transparent tulle which give the audience the feeling of a three-dimensional environment floating in the space of the church.
GruppoGruppo: the Italian artists and musicians Alessandro Perini (organ) and Fabio Monni (composer) media artist.
Organotronics (CZ, NL) - organ, video/ light design and electronics
This performance makes a true connection between arts: Organotronics ìs Connecting Arts by literally connecting arts and artists from different countries and disciplines.
Kateřina Chroboková is a successful young organist from Czech Republic who studied in the Netherlands. There she met a Greek, a Mexican and an Indonesian composer, who felt challenged to write for this virtuous musician. The aim of the artists is to attract a young audience by offering a concert in which especially young people will recognise themselves: by the use of electronics and light as known from the modern disco- and pop-scene.
Two Dutch artists contribute with light and video projections while the poems of Lorca and Amichai about the sun, love and passion make a connection with organ music.
Duration: 60 min | Kateřina Chroboková, organ | Philemon Mukarno, Dimitris Andrikopoulos and Juan Felipe Waller, composers | Henk van der Geest, light design | Maarten Warmerdam video artist |
Wind Images (NL) – organ, poetry and percussion
Tsjêbbe Hettinga’s haunting poetry and lyrical improvisations provide the inspiration for the music of Reitze Smits (organ) and Sytze Pruiksma (drums). The earthy spatiality and emotional richness of Hettinga’s highly visual poetry finds expression in the combination of the instruments and the characteristic vocal qualities of the poet himself. The music is an improvisation on Hettinga’s poetry which resounds like the wind along the shores of Friesland (a Dutch province where the three artists were born). The unique acoustic imagination of Sytze Pruiksma is inspired by the sounds of this landscape, giving the rhythm of his poetry a powerful emotional pull. The organ provides a tonal foundation which is rooted in the intertwining of melody and the spoken word, creating a suggestive stillness or, alternatively, a dynamic outburst.
Duration: 60 min |Reitze Smits, organ | Tsjêbbe Hettinga, poet | Sytze Pruiksma, percussion |
Jazz Prominents (NL) – jazz and organ
Two recent winners of the prestigious Dutch Jazz award, The Boy Edgar Prize, play together in the popular combination of trumpet and organ. Bert van den Brink is a jazz piano and organ player with a classical background. He adapts the jazzy way of playing to the organ with great feeling for the instrument: not just imitating piano tricks, but using all the organ recourses in a new, often amazing way. Eric Vloeimans, a prominent Dutch trumpet player worked together with Bert van den Brink in many other settings and always with success. Duration: 60 min | Bert van den Brink, organ | Eric Vloeimans, trumpet |
Canto Ostinato (NL), dervish dance and organ
A Concert Spirituel: East meets West
The performance of Canto Ostinato is rather a ritual than a concert. It is a composition about time, space and everlasting motion, written by Simeon ten Holt in 1976.
The organ, being the symbol of Western Christian culture, meets the dervish meditation dance of the Sufi’s, representing the Islamic culture. East meets West in a continual motion, a perpetuum mobile, invoking an atmosphere of spirituality in music and dance, which connects both traditions. Time becomes enormously dynamical; it becomes a space in which the musical object is floating. Time ultimately determines form and content. In this work repetition seems to be everlasting (minimal music). This suites very well to a performance on the organ, being a spatial instrument since it only functions by the grace of space.
Duration: 60 min | Aart Bergwerff, organ | Kadir Sonuk, dervish dance |
Opera on organ (FR) – organ an percussion, music by Jean-Philippe Rameau
'Les Sauvages' and other pieces
In his time it was not allowed to play secular music in church, but how great does Rameau´s opera-music sound on organ! Already at the end of the 18th century it was performed on organ in the famous `Concerts Spirituels`, but now Yves Rechsteiner took up this historical idea and arranged a large number of instrumental movements for organ. He published the scores and made a beautiful recording.Together with the percussionist Henri-Charles Caget, who plays a broad collection of instruments from all corners of the church, Yves Rechsteiner gives a new life to Rameau´s music and to the organ: a new sound for this beautiful old music.
Duration: 60 min | Yves Rechsteiner, organ | Henri-Charles Caget, percussion |
