cie. toula limnaios

»in den wind geschriebenes«

it’s rare to hear music without dancers at HALLE Tanzbühne Berlin. on two evenings in july, that changes: ralf r. ollertz, who has written the music for cie. toula limnaios’s choreographies for three decades, steps into the spotlight with his own works and has invited his longtime companions christian banasik and achim christian bornhöft to enrich the evening with further compositions.

for more than four decades, ollertz has been developing a musical language that emerges from literature, images, and observations of society. he understands his works as a sensory, physical experience, regardless of whether they are produced by instruments or loudspeakers. his electroacoustic music takes sounds drawn from the real world as their starting point: recordings of voices and noises are processed, altered, and recombined, yet retain a physical presence. at cie. toula limnaios, music and choreography emerge as equals, independently of one another: in close dialogue, yet each with its own layers of meaning that only unfold through their interplay.

the two concert evenings, titled »in den wind geschriebenes«, bring together very different works by the three composers: christian banasik combines computer-generated music with his own video projections, while achim christian bornhöft presents a work for electric guitar together with guitarist adrian pereyra. among other works, ralf r. ollertz brings his piece »l’absence« to the stage, performed live by three speakers. the programme also includes his desert trilogy »pyrocua«, »cral’une«, and »unacres«, created during his early collaboration with toula limnaios.

»His musical sensibility has rested upon our bodies with tenderness and care, and his music expresses the untranslatable. It guided us out of this fragile labyrinth, a wandering within it like a tightrope act, in which Ralf Ollertz held the rope firmly to his ear so that we would not lose ourselves in the fear, the passion, the sorrow and the madness of this maze.« (Toula Limnaios)

»To use the beautiful words of Paul Klee, Ralf R. Ollertz is somewhat closer to the core of creation than one usually encounters. The composer enchants and fractures musical matter without falling into the black hole of abstraction. His sounds repeatedly climb the walls of a Tower of Babel devoted solely to sensuality.« (Luc Honorez)