Conjoined Fugues
Conjoined Fugues is a steampunk-surrealistic live concert performance about the myth surrounding Friedrich Nietzsche’s life incidence in Turin (January 1889). The performance is an hour-long Happening consisting of four body-sculpture instruments (Hydra, Chorus, Serpent and Lily, Dithyramb). Each body-sculpture instrument holds a mythical character developed from Nietzsche’s biography and Greek mythology, and directly relate with each other. The characters develop forms of communications that embody sound and movement, and the multi-dimensional environment through derealised eyes.
Conjoined Fugues imagines Nietzsche’s breakdown and creates a narrative where Nietzsche (the audience) visits his mental breakdown once again under an indeterminate derealised state, a state of mind where reality ruptures. Through Nietzche’s imagined breakdown, the four body-sculptures emerge and take agency in his mind and body. The performance begins with a dream-trip of a derealised state while the audience witnesses the state where objects are not identified in a simultaneous co-existence with an other world; on the one hand, the past entertains the moment before “self-abandonment” and “loss of memory”, and on the other hand, the audience witnesses the present where the performance seduces the suffering within the characters themselves. Through Nietzsche’s correspondences to Cosima Wagner which were signed in the name of “Dionysos” the surreal in Nietzsche’s life, takes form. Nietzsche’s correspondences and breakdown become essential, and take one back to Nietzsche’s early philosophical thought related to the Greek mythological gods, Apollo and Dionysos.
The Happening encourages the audience to lose their sense of self, and instead seize the blurriness between perception and representation, reality and fiction, subject and object, anatomy and topography. The aesthetics of the Happening, are an impulse from a particular moment in history, the Happenings in the 1960s. Through Happenings, the performance considers “indeterminacy” that allow one formulate and perceive the multiplicity of the environment, where two (or more) simultaneous environments emerge in space.
Direction: Nicolina Stylianou
Performance: Louna-Tuuli Luukka, Jouni Ilari Tapio, Suvi Tuominen, Nicolina Stylianou
Production Manager: Danai Anagnostou
