Muziekgebouw is pleased to present Nightwater, a performance-installation by the transdisciplinary artist, director and composer Thanasis Deligiannis.
What happens when you teleport an industrial irrigation machine from a Greek village to an Amsterdam concert hall? This is what Nightwater, the new production by Deligiannis, explores. Nightwater is conceived as a hybrid experience between an immersive installation, a performance and a concert, which adjusts in scale & composition in order to be in a dialogue with the venue it is presented in. The project has its starting point in the ongoing research by the artist and Yannis Michalopoulos; from the performance ENA ENA (Gaudeamus & Onassis Stegi), to the large-scale Margaroni Residency (Onassis Stegi), up to the collaborative work Xirómero/Dryland at Venice Biennale (national participation of Greece).
Nightwater has been created especially for Muziekgebouw, and transforms it for three days into a giant resonance chamber, making the entire building vibrate. The structure of the work follows dream logic, it conjures a fragmentary world of video images, field recordings, and live musicians -all echoes of Deligiannis’s research into rural culture. with As a visitor, you create your own narrative, your own experience, You witness what happens-but also become part of the whole.
The artist teams up with the adventurous Ensemble Klang (September 12 & 13), with the series “The Rest Is Noise” and invited electronic music artists Deena Abdelwahed and Zohar (September 13, late night), as well as with guest Greek folk musicians throughout the entire event (September 12–14).
Thanasis Deligiannis explains: “Nightwater creates a world inspired by the rural culture of the Greek countryside and installs it inside Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw, an urban cultural institution. An industrial watering machine installed in the building’s large garage, begins to “dream” and unfold the work itself, transforming and reusing the various spaces: the main and small stages, the backstage, the foyers. The audience walks around and discovers this world of the work at their own pace. In essence, Nightwater is a composition of media, materials, and memories, both familiar and unfamiliar. It unfolds over three days, starting with the preparation of a feast that never begins, continuing with the climax of a party, as an alternative celebration in today’s Amsterdam, and ending on the last day “after the celebration”. The work is quite personal to me, bringing back memories of my younger life in the area of Thessaly in Greece: the crops, the watering, the feasts, the music, my father playing the clarinet and my mother loving to dance. This experience concerns rural culture more broadly, not so much through the feast itself, but through the way the celebration coexists with loss, absence, togetherness, perseverance, and patience in the face of the dysfunctions and difficulties of life in the countryside. I am interested in opening new spaces for the spectator, while creating a hybrid world of counterpoints—as much composed, as unexpected.”
Read more about: Nightwater / Thanasis Deligiannis / the team / Muziekgebouw.
Nightwater is a coproduction of the Muziekgebouw Production House and the I/O Foundation, and is presented with the support of the Cultuurfonds, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Onassis Stegi–Touring Program, HVA International, the Greek Embassy in the Netherlands, Aegean Airlines and the Greek House in Rotterdam.
