RAUM

A conspiracy of music, dance and stage design

RAUM is a new collaborative effort by the choreographer Marc Vanrunxt and the Champ d’Action new music ensemble. Once again they have opted for the rich musical world of the American composer Morton Feldman. The 1981 compositions Patterns in a Chromatic Field (for piano and cello) and Crippled Symmetry (for flute, piano and glockenspiel), confront us with the more monumental side of Feldman’s oeuvre.

For three hours we are swept along in a broad stream of time and space, of watching and listening. The tempo of the performance is slow and without dramatic climaxes or ‘events’. Feldman weaves a composition like a Turkish carpet or a minimalist painting by Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman. In the first part (Patterns in a Chromatic Field) the choreography focuses on transparency and austerity, with three dancers and two musicians in the area of tension between chaos and monotony. In part two (Crippled Symmetry) the spectator himself is placed in the middle of the tapestry of constant transformations.

RAUM asks the spectator to surrender himself to time and space, to visual and auditory impressions. RAUM is an experience that unashamedly takes its time and ‘taking time’ means ‘creating space’. The choreography and stage design (by the artists Koenraad Dedobbeleer and Kristof Van Gestel) evolved from listening to the music very intensely, and promising to merge with it and arrive at an experience that gives dance and music the same degree of presence, as bearers of space and time.