Commission to Natacha Diels

In her new work, Natacha Diels creates imaginary spaces through disparate combinations of acoustic and physical environments. By manipulating the acoustics, theatrical lighting and projections, this piece seeks to disrupt this perception in order to enable a journey through the fantastic. The audience becomes an active character in an imaginative insect ritual. They are immersed in a musical and visual landscape with a fantastical narrative in which they are the main character, guided by a spoken text.

Three locations represent the three stages of the ritual: gathering and hatching (stage 1), in which the audience sits in a large spiral, surrounded by a slowly evolving halo of sound; Emergence into maturity (stage 2) – characterised by extremely bright light and an ever-expanding stasis (through an play with acoustics); and Copulation and Death (stage 3) – characterised by a dissolution of the previous stasis into a measured chaos that is both joyful and terminal.

The audience wears headphones and is divided into three groups with three unique audio outputs. In stage 1, the audience is united in a spiral and the groups are arranged linearly. In stage 2, the audience within each group is divided into smaller subgroups. Each subgroup experiences this phase independently. In stage 3, the audience sits in narrow parallel rows facing each other.

The commission to Natacha Diels for CONTRECHAMPS has been made possible by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

Further information:
contrechamps.ch

Date

April 8, 2025
Maison communale de Plainpalais, Geneva