Composition Commission issued to Helmut Oehring

HELLERAU – Europäisches Zentrum der Künste/European Center for the Arts, Dresden, Germany

With the vocal-instrumental audiovisual dance requiem EURYDIKE? vol. 2, composer and director Helmut Oehring and his team continue their current cycle of documentary poetic works focusing on isolated female perspectives in traditional male dramas.

After the premiere series of the audio-video installation featuring the performance EURYDIKE vol. 1, Oehring has been commissioned by HELLERAU to continue Eurydice’s search for communication and language in music and gesture, performance and dance, sound and video. He is composing an audio-visual score consisting of vocal instrumental recomposition, electronic composition, an adaptation of Monteverdi’s L'Orfeo, texts and choreography (based on the spatial grammar and syntax of his mother tongue, German sign language).

EURYDIKE? returns: deaf dancer and actress Kassandra Wedel, violinist Emily Yabe and guitarist and youth actress Mia Carla Oehring portray Eurydice in snapshots depicting her path out of the underworld: isolation, outer and inner captivity, her return to the world, to society, and a reflection of possible existences between victimhood and perpetrator, revenge and remorse, trial and failure, hope and capitulation.

The three protagonists simultaneously enter into the music-theatrical stage action with the ensemble El Perro Andaluz and AuditivVokal and into the real-documentary communication with prisoners of the Dresden Hellerau Prison, people and their biographies, caught between the extremes of life imprisonment and social as well as media isolation, possible release and “resocialization”.

Further Information:
hellerau.org