COLLABORATORY – EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED
ULYSSES Collaboratory projects provide new perspectives on creative collaboration, testing new methodologies and forms of cooperation tightly linked to specific contexts and audiences. and reflecting on shared responsibility and collective processes.
Collaboratory “Expect the Unexpected”: The Writing-Game is a Special Program with Bernhard Lang offered to composers participanting in the impuls Academy 2023 in Graz (AT). The goal of the program is to explore the concepts and notions of gaming within the contexts of improvisation and composing.
Composition series such as DW Differenz/Wiederholung, Monadologie or more current also GAME are one characteristic for Bernhard Lang´s extensive artistic creation, researches and development. Starting with the SCAN-Project back in 2015, Lang together with Klangforum Wien tried to organize large-scale group improvisations based on his own existing compositions by formulating rule-sets for the improvisers. This led to the origin of “series six”, the GAME pieces, in 2016: while exploring the meaning of both Game and Play, they consist of musical Game-situations like card-games, and are to be considered as self-oranizing-systems (S.O.S), like most improvisations hereby omitting the conductor. They furthermore consist but of individual parts plus rulesets for playing with these.
For the impuls Academy 2023 Bernhard Lang developed a Special Program for composition Academy participants, to further explore the notions and concepts of gaming within the contexts of both improvisation and composing together. Starting with an initial lecture on gaming, the daily worksessions then explore the notion of gaming, inventing new games, new rules, perhaps formulating a new game-piece in the end, in a small collaborative group structure. A final presentation, be it of a newly developed collective game-piece or a more theoretical discussion on the topic and the process of the working sessions, now stands at the end of this collaboratory.
Date and venue: 24.7.-30.7.2023 Special Program Collaboratory “Expect the Unexpected”: The Writing-Game at impuls Academy & Festival KUG . Brandhof 21 . Aula, Brandhofgasse 21, 8010 Graz
coached by Bernhard Lang
with Luis Fernando Amaya Muñoz, Raphaël Belfiore, Carolina Cerezo Dávila, Max Gibson, Danilo Imson, Ron Katzman, Elena Perales Andreu, Inbar Sharet, Siebe Thijs, Elena Weinberg
Luis Fernando Amaya Imaginary Rooms (2023, world premiere)
Yehu Dar-Sha’ashua & Ron Katzman Panda (2023, world premiere)
Inbar Sharet Consensus (2023, world premiere)
Max Gibson round and around and a round (2023, world premiere)
Danny Imson Mapapalad (2023, world premiere)
Raphaël Belfiore THE NU MUSIC BINGO, IMPULS Edition (2023, world premiere)
Bernhard Lang. Photo: Harald Hoffmann