Tony Wagner
Choir of Kin – Performance

Choir of Kin (2024)

Transformative Narratives (Lena Kuzmich,Tony Wagner & Guests)

In Choir of Kin, the collective Transformative Narratives invites the audience to partake in an immersive audiovisual experience. The installation, together with a performance that commences from March 14-16th during the Imagetanz festival at brut nordwest, see the voices of various life forms merge in a fictional habitat. Explorative sounds reverberating in this intricate scenery cherish the get-together of human and non-human collaborators in a multi-species affair. 

The piece roots in the collective’s inquiries into symbiosis, entanglement of landscapes, and sympoietic world-building. Queer understandings of kinship are applied to research in ecology, biology, and music theory. Practices of active listening and engagement with beyond-human agencies form crucial methodologies.

Sonic and textual interventions by the human performers meet sound creations generated from data by non-human life. Inhabiting the Grey Space at brut, the artists form a choir with the scenery they sonically interact with. This Choir of Kin acts as a resilient yet dissonant defense system for dealing with environmental and generational trauma.

Lena Kuzmich 
Direction, concept development, artistic direction, stage concept, costume concept, production, installation, text, visuals, performance, electronics, vocals 

Tony Wagner
Direction, concept development, artistic and musical direction, performance and music concept, production, installation, composition, text, performance, violin, vocals

Karolina Preuschl 
Concept development, composition, text, performance, piano, modular synthesizer, vocals 

Hyeji Nam
Concept development, composition, text, performance, piano, synthesizer, vocals 

Miriam Adefris 
Harp, composition, performance, vocals 

Christina Ruf 
Cello, composition, performance, vocals 

Melinda Franzke 
Double bass, composition, performance, vocals 

Mother Cell (Jack Brenner, Mason Wilson, Sam Whitlaw)
(Mis)Guided Meditation. Edit for Choir of Kin by Jack Brenner 

Melissa Antunes de Menezes 
Head of production 

Leo Kuraitė 
Light design and technics 

Barbara Urbanic
Horticulture, set design 

Georg Hampe
Stage design 

amaaenaStudio, Yi-Jing Chen – Growing with Garments 
Costume 

Parnia Sarraf @aetna.club
Head of Make-up 

Cameron Lee Felton @aetna.club 
Make-up assistance 

Rein van der Woerd, Marwin Nehl, Peter Arnold 
Electronics, coding 

Ipek Hamzaoglu 
Video documentation 

Marcella Ruiz Cruz 
Photo documentation 

Lennart Horst 
Text 

Tiger Dingsun 
Graphic design 

Scientific collaborators 
Joshua Lawrence (Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, UK), Alberto Scarampi (Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, UK), Artscience Lab Forms Lab, The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL), Photosynthetic Device: Dr. Paolo Bombelli (Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, UK) 

Sponsoring of Reishi mushroom installation and support in the research process 
Mushroom Research Center Austria 

A co-production of imagetanz 2024/brut Wien and Transformative Narratives.

With the kind support of the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs, SKE, Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, Civil Service and Sport

Development of this project was supported by the European Media Art Platform in the framework of a research residency at Antre Peaux, France.

Link:
https://brut-wien.at/de/Programm/Kalender/Programm-2024/03/Transformative-Narratives-Lena-Kuzmich-Tony-Wagner-Guests