Il Teatro Rosso (II)

Steven Kazuo Takasugi / Huei Lin: Il Teatro Rosso (2024)

Act I: The Red Theatre
Act II: The Drowning

Sarah Albu (Stimme / Voice)
Steven Kazuo Takasugi (Komposition / Composition)
Huei Lin (Film)
No Hay Banda

No Hay Banda translates as ‟there is no band". The Montreal-based collective is difficult to pigeonhole. Its manifestations oscillate between concert series, production platform, label and ensemble. Drummer and curator Noam Bierstone, one of the group's founders and its creative head, participated in the Darmstadt Summer Course several times before launching the No Hay Banda project with other musicians in Montreal in 2016. Since then, it has quickly become a leading voice of experimental new music in Canada. In February, No Hay Banda premiered the full-length piece Il Teatro Rosso by Steven Kazuo Takasugi (music) and Huei Lin (film) in Montreal and now brings it to Europe for the first time. Takasugi's Sideshow was performed to acclaim at the 2016 Summer Course, and the US composer is finally back in Darmstadt with a major work. His music and Lin's congenial ‟visual soundtrack" teleport the seven musicians into a velvety-red vaudeville world, inspired by the theater and entertainment culture of the early 20th century.

They merge past and present, Belle Époche and hip glamor, live and recorded, real and virtual, truth and falsity.Observer and observed swap places. We are whisked away into a world that seems both familiar and unfamiliar, full of weird nostalgia. What is real, what is fictitious? What can I know, who can I believe? Welcome to Teatro Rosso, whose distorted hall of mirrors confronts us with questions of the here and now.

Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and CALQ (Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec)