Premiere: TRISOLDE. THE WEEPING OAK

Next performances „TRISOLDE“ and „THE WEEPING OAK“ April 8th and April 11th 19.00 at Sakala 3, Tallinn. Premiered on March 4th 2019.

“Trisolde” is a symbiotic dance performance inspired by R.Wagner´s opera “Tristan and Isolde”. It is about vibrant relationships between man and woman, confrontational feelings and passion. This work combines interactive technology, audiovisual images and contemporary choreography. Dancers are partly controlling the music via body movements and some voluntarily selected audience members will influence the real-time sound with their psychophysiological reactions via sensors. This work brings together many exciting fields of art and research from computational creativity to physiological computing:. to use the audience's reactions to module the sound orchestra is new way of doing "participatory theatre". Interactive technology support for „Trisolde“ comes from TLU DTI Associate Professor in physiological computing Aleksnder Väljamäe and Senior Research Fellow Ilkka Kosunen.
“Tristan and Isolde” is widely considered both as one of the greatest operas of all time as well as beginning of modernism in music, introducing techniques such as chromaticism dissonance and even atonality. It has sometimes been described as a “symphony with words”; the opera lacks major stage action, large choruses or wide range of characters. Most of the “action” of the opera happens inside of the heads of Tristan and Isolde. This provides amazing possibilities for creating a biocybernetic system for the dance performance: I this case, Tristan and Isolde will communicate both explicitly (through movement of the dancers) but also implicitly via the measured psychophysiological signals.

More about TRISO LDE

In "The Weeping Oak" choreographer Simo Kruusement takes growth and transformation as key ideas and images for creating new dance production for Tallinn University dance students. Folklore and wildlife are inexhaustible sources for this collaborative production and inspiration for Simo´s inventive and delicate movement language. In this explorative and in many ways challenging dance work movement, word and sound are equally important mediums. The idea of cutting off the trees and giving them a new meaningful substance is related to many mythologies of Northen countries and in many ways rooted in Estonian national epos.

Duration: 1hour and 40 minutes. This project is co-operation between teachers and students of Tallinn University and Estonian Academy of Music and Fine5 Dance Theatre.