Orfeo

About

Orpheus and Eurydice: He is the survivor, she is the deceased. He transforms his suffering into art, she dies silently. Orpheus descends into the underworld to bring Eurydice back to a life with him.

In this performative installation by Susanne Kennedy, Suzan Boogaerdt and Bianca van der Schoot, “Orfeo” is conceived as a walkable parcours. The audience is guided through various spaces in groups of no more than eight. The plot focusses on the underworld; the audience witnesses Eurydice’s life after death. Inspired by the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” and the stages of death and resurrection it describes, the artists have created a polyphonic spatial structure which the spectators will move through. It’s a world that plays on the ambivalent relationship between actual physical and virtual states. A fusion of the physical and the digital self occurs in this hyperreal setting, inhabited by “synthetic girls”.

This state of limbo where Eurydice resides is surrounded by music. Musical fragments from Monteverdi’s opera take on a life of their own and connect the spaces she lives in. Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop translate Monteverdi’s score into moment-like sound events, independent of the music’s original chronological progression. Instead, the musicians synchronise their playing with a digital version of the score. This lets them become part of the machine that steers these intermediate worlds.