coal mine birds

Andreas Berger, composition/ soundconcept
Chris Haring, artistic director/ choreography
Stefan Grissemann, text
Thomas Jelinek, Licht Design/ scenography

Liquid Loft
Corali Benard, dance/ choreography
Jackson Carroll, dance/ choreography
Cristina Commisso, dance/ choreography
Verena Herterich, dance/ choreography
Livia Khazanehdari, dance/ choreography
Katharina Meves, dance/ choreography
François-Eloi Lavignac, dance/ choreography
Dante Murillo, dance/ choreography
Ida Osten, dance/ choreography
Hannah Timbrell, dance/ choreography

Valentina Diaz, social media
Roman Harrer, stage management
Cornelia Lehner, company management
Stefan Röhrle, costume
Judith Thaler, production

PHACE
Manuel Alcaraz Clemente, percussion
Alexandra Dienz, double bass
Mathilde Hoursiangou, piano / keyboard
Roland Schueler, cello
Walter Seebacher, clarinette(s)

Reinhard Fuchs, artistic director
Markus Bruckner, produktion
Michael Eder, PR & social media

a feverish journey into darkness, where sound, bodies, and objects blend into unstable hybrids: Dido’s Lamento sinks chromatically downward, breaking apart into glissandi, pizzicati, and bottleneck cries. Memories flare like strobes, light becomes both narcotic and intoxication – a club, a grave, a stage of shadows. Voices, bodies, samples, bursts of rock, piano crashes, field recordings: everything shatters, everything starts again. A tribute, a distortion, a transformation – wild, sarcastic, intimate. Music theater as a burning mine, as a frozen glacier, as a lament tearing itself apart.

Beyond familiar models of opera, coal mine birds (a postscript to the ImPulsTanz Festival) presents itself as music theater: a choreography for ten performers and five musicians, reimagining ballroom encounters in strange, fragmented ways, with the audience entering a stage-within-the-stage, drawn directly into the surrounding scene. Six contemporary works are performed live – by Simon Steen Andersen, Alessandro Baticci, Jérôme Combier, François Sarhan, Agata Zubel and Andreas Berger – music that reinterprets the past to cast forward into the future. It becomes an installative dance evening, a ghostly variation on the ball, where gestures against loneliness are staged, pushing toward intensity, ecstasy, dissolution. Bodies and objects become hybrids, forming unexpectedly only to fall apart again – like a thought flashing across synapses, like a fleeting memory, like a utopia too fragile to last.

More at Liquid Loft.

PROGRAMM

Simon Steen-Andersen
Queen of the Night  for voice solo (from “Inszenierte Nacht”, 2013)

François Sarhan
Wyatt for keyboard, double bass, vibraphone (N° 11 from “Hell”, 2005)

Agata Zubel
Shades of Ice for clarinet, cello and electronics (2011)

Alessandro Baticci
Luminal Mirage for ensemble and electronics (2025)
in a hybrid version with live and prerecorded instruments

Jerome Combier
Laid in earth for piano solo and electronics (2019)
in an augmented arrangement for piano, clarinet, cello, double bass and electronics (Reinhard Fuchs)

and music by Andreas Berger

With kind support by IMPULSTANZ.