With The Physical Mind, Teun Vonk seeks to let participants experience the relation between their physical and mental states by applying physical pressure to the body. The installation consists of two inflatable objects. The participant lays down in between, is lifted up and gently squeezed between the two inflatable objects. The lifting creates an unstable feeling, a slightly stressful sensation that is directly contrasted with a secure feeling of being gently squeezed between two soft objects. Paradoxically, this forced physical stimulus reduces feelings anxiety and paradoxically stress and the flight- or fight-response disappear. The participant experiences and increased sensitivity to stimuli, normalised alertness and a calm state of mind. The positive effects of this increased receptivity can continue for a few hours after the experience. The installation evokes empathy in bystanders who witness a participant undergo the experience.

Maintenant Festival

Polygon 02016 is a large kinetic structure composed of lightweight articulating tubes hanging from thin wires. Via a mechanism of motors and counterweights it becomes a geometric landscape that moves organically and adjusts shape and balance in response to the visitors. 

Maintenant Festival

Nemo Observatorium 02002 - Styrofoam particles are blown around in a big transparent PVC cylinder by 5 strong fans. Visitors can take place one by one on the armchair in the middle of the whirlpool or observe from the outside. On the chair, in the eye of the storm it is calm and safe. Spectacular at first sight, this installation turns out to mesmerise as a kind of meditation machine. One can follow the seemingly cyclic patterns, focus on the different layers of 3D pixels or listen to its waterfall sound. One could call it a training device, challenging the visitor to stay centered and find peace in a fast changing environment. After a while the space seems to expand and one's sense of time deludes. Impressive and hypnotic.

Transporter 02008 - Two conveyor belts of about 13m long are set up next to each other and running in opposite directions. People can lay down on them to be transported very slowly. Hidden under the surface an invisible mechanism produces a subtle yet intense tactile experience for the spine. Halfway the trajectory the visitors are confronted with two horizontal mirrors moving up and down above them.

Les Halles

Since her 2015 opera "Private View" based on an Alfred Hitchcock film, if not earlier, the Belgian Annelies Van Parys has established her reputation as one of the most innovative composers of contemporary musical theatre. Her work is distinguished by a keen interest in the facets of the human singing voice as well as an idiosyncratic approach to instrumentation. Starting with the material of the uncompleted opera – Debussy left behind several libretto drafts, a musical fragment of about 20 minutes and some sketches – in "Usher" Van Parys develops a chamber music theatre that probes the category of the uncanny in a specific musical and theatrical way.

Music Annelies Van Parys / Claude Debussy 
Text Gaea Schoeters / Claude Debussy based on "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe

Commissioned by Staatsoper Unter den Linden and Folkoperan Stockholm

Musical Director Marit Strindlund Director, set designer, light Philippe Quesne Dramaturgy Roman Reeger Roderick Usher David Oštrek L'ami Martin Gerke Le médecin Dominic Kraemer Lady Madeline Ruth Rosenfeld  Musicians of the Staatskapelle Berlin 

12 - 30 October 2018 
Staatsoper Unter den Linden

February 2019 
Folkoperan Stockholm

Economic theory for Dummies (2013) is a performance lecture by Amund Sjølie Sveen investigating our present economic system; the theoretical, historical, philosophical and psychological background of todays economic reality – and how the rhetorics of this system is present in our minds and media.

5 October 2018
Festival Nordic Nights, Helsinki (FI)

19 October 2018
Festival Kåkånomics, Stavanger (NO)

Shrink 01995 - Two large, transparent plastic sheets and a device that gradually sucks the air out from between them leave the body vacuum-packed and vertically suspended. The transparent tube inserted between the two surfaces allows the person inside the installation to regulate the flow of air. As a result of the increasing pressure between the plastic sheets, the surface of the packed body gradually freezes into multiple micro-folds. For the duration of the performance the person inside moves slowly and changes positions, which vary from an almost embryonic position to one resembling a crucified body.

At NU Performance Festival 2018 there will be 5 Shrinks and the bodies of 5 performers.

NU Performance Festival 2018

Today, our society suffers a future crisis. It seems nearly impossible to imagine a society radically different form the existing one. We are trapped in the realities of the present. The project DIY or manual for a possible future, is based on recognition that the world can not change if we are unable to think about new futures. More than ever, we therefore need utopias. 

Performance by and with installation artist Lawrence Malstaf, dancer / performer Liv Hanne Haugen, playwright Tale Næss, musician / performer Amund Sjølie Sveen and director Jon Tombre 

KHIO Oslo

Until 7 October 2018

tele-present water - 2011 draws information from the intensity and movement of the water in a remote location. The wave intensity and frequency collected from the buoy is scaled and transferred to the mechanical grid structure, resulting in a simulation of the physical effects caused by the movement of water from this distant unknown location. This work physically replicates a remote experience and makes observation of the activity of an isolated object, otherwise lost at sea, possible through direct communication

http://www.123data.paris
https://fondation.edf.com/fr/expositions/1-2-3