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Die Unbändigen
Choreography of a band as improbable community

Jack Hauser: visual artist, filmmaker, musician (A)
Satu Herrala: choreographer, performer (F/A)
Sabina Holzer: choreographer, performer, writer (A)
Jeroen Peeters: writer, performer, musician (B)

Production: cattravelsnotalone
With the friendly support of: Wien Kultur, Tanzquartier Vienna, Im_flieger, ImPulsTanz Vienna,
Bains Connective, Sarma, WorkSpaceBrussels

Premiere: 30th Nov. 2012 Tanzquartier Vienna
+ 1st Dec. 2012


Foto: Jack Hauser

The collaborative, transmedial performance project Die Unbändigen addresses the need and concern
to develop and investigate alternative modes of living and producing.

Within the productional frame imposed by limited time and resources,
Die Unbändigen seeks to reach a specific goal throughout several meetings:
making something together.

As if they were a band, Jack Hauser, Satu Herrala, Sabina Holzer and Jeroen Peeters
encounter one another with and through their artistic practices as their instruments.

In Die Unbändigen they create a language and scores for performative and visual intervention,
prompted by a shared songbook of materials charted on A6 file cards.

MATERIALS

Die Unbändigen
Dossier

Meeting #1@ ImPulsTanz; July 2011

We collect ideas, images, perceptions and movements of which we keep track through an
A6 file card system, which allows oneto “reduce” heterogeneous materials to an exchangeable
format. The file card system includes quotations, stories, keywords, scores,newspaper clippings,
postcards, photographs, etc. In a sense it functions as a collective notebook throughout the process,
but equally forms the basis for the choreography and scenography.

With these cards we create maps, a way of visualizing and negotiating possible and unexpected relations.
These maps will be placed in the space and constitute the shared ground in which common ideas out of
field trips, poetic actions and philosophical reflections are developed. We can move inside these maps
as a way of investigating them, or take distance in order to gain an overview.
They function as a shared system of orientation.

Freejazz Night @ Wohnung Miryam van Doren, July 2011

As on a winternight an alligator crawls over the hill…

A free improvisation game piece performed at Wohnung Miryam Van Doren, Vienna – 21 July 2011, 8.00PM – 4.30AM by

Jack Hauser as “Aufleger”,
Jeroen Peeters as “Mitschreiber”,
Sabina Holzer as “dog, plant, ant, horse, strange dance, New York, nameless, shameless, blue eyes, street,
drugstore, always far out, drop out, listener, woof, party, needle, green leaves (a.o.),
Satu Herrala as “Miss Such”.

We don’t know what free jazz is…




“Protest from New York, a box with musical file cards turned side down, shuffled into a wild mix: John Zorn’s Godard. Ça vous chante?
The explicit, violent, interruptive editorial process, both Godard’s and Zorn’s, expose another violence, that of mainstream culture’s
status quo. Zorn taps into history, not to develop an authentic language for the future, but to embrace the arbitrary contract and the
idiosyncratic gesture as disturbing musical truth – yet not without promise: the music is gestural on the level of composition, with
musicians conducted in the studio to improvise the jiggsaw puzzle of fragments, ride the waves of history as available in a myriad
of idiomatic bits and pieces, a rough crystalline surface. Does it ‘sing’ to you? Allowance of a broad palette, literalism, noise, rubbish,
bullshit, showing off, virtuosity, failure, daring, ineptitude (or not quite), film, a voice, yes, sometimes.
But: the file card box is a machine, it cuts and pastes, combines improbable snippets, or better it brings the familiar into the foreign through improbable combinations, hybridizations, juxtapositions. The method is one of shuffling, which is done by the hands.
Surgery, history, genealogy, editing: the hand wields the knife; they’re an affair of cutting.” (Jeroen Peeters)

“Improvisation also means to let go of preparation, to unlearn and shed history, paradoxically though it may sound,
all of this to seize the moment and tune in to the co-players in the band and into the physical and acoustic environment.
Four needles in one space, listening, scanning, concatenating bodies and things.
‘Writing with’ like ‘being with’ or a small community, an ‘unbändige Band’.
Drifting, into ‘the multiplicity of other types of destinies.’ What is the power of imagination?” (Jeroen Peeters)

“Rubbing, pulling, scratiching, hitting, stomping, fiddling, strumming, flashing, out of the bag, into the bag, a light-sensitive skin,
carrying, shielding, gnawing, applauding, rumbling, fumbling, ticking, frolicking, knistern, sliding, gliding, reverberating, voicing,
creaking, tingling, ringing, anticipating a stroke, drumming, cupboarding, shuffling, speaking, rattling, tapping, blowing, cutting,
sanding, toot-toot!-ing, sweeping, caressing,… The Wohnung Miryam Van Doren becomes an instrument itself, literally a musical instrument, if not a drumset. Pillowing, cardboarding, beerbottling, fanning, writing, scribbling, glueing, book throwing, sirening,
Djun-Djun-ing, tiptoeing, armpitting, bird’s eye-ing, bending, leaning, hailing, threading, hugging, listening, wavering, vibrating,
bridging, lying, awaiting, fingering, pointing, fluttering, wrapping, auflegen.” (Jeroen Peeters)

"This is a house. The house of noise. People are wondering through the house like clouds. They tumble up and down the the scale
with crystal breath. Writing is happening in the space. Seething writing. New words appear. Sounds of difference. Sounds of silence.
This is the house of breath. Of ghosts and whispers. And shouting. And funny walks. Hippe de hopp. On hold. Some tiptoes.
Some light connection. Foreverness nevertheless listed. Oh my, what a beautiful day. An angle is passing by. Even we can't say.
We are just about to turn the page." (Sabina Holzer)

Meeting #2 / Artist in Residence im_Flieger, Dec. 2011

Revisiting our collective memory recorded on A6 file cards, we started to explore composition with such heterogeneous materials. The cards were shuffled in conversation games or mapped onto the dance floor, with some of the materials eventually spilling into the space, resonating in our bodies, or being identified as “instruments”. How could we develop scores from there? How to share this particular process with an audience? How to honour the arbitrary principles of collecting and composing? What could conducting mean for us in performance? More cards with signs and colour codes allowed us to experiment with conducting scores.

After ten days we invited an audience into our space world. We opened Pandora’s box with Yoko Ono, projected ping pong balls, followed by circus knives, ideas, voices and bodies ricocheting across the space. Bang! We performed an auscultation upon a shot body, scratched records, let a feedbacking microphone go haywire, embraced more noise and dreamed with Sun Ra. As if wielding a soothsayer’s staff, one of us conducted the score, tracing, prompting, cutting and framing its unfolding in real time. To then repeat it all over, devoting ourselves to the gesture’s madness, to what Roland Barthes called “the totally ritual and totally arbitrary preparation of a meaning.

SOUND OF JOY
(SUN RA)

the sound of joy / is enlightenment / the space fire truth / is enlightenment
space fire / sometimes it's music / strange mathematics / rhythmic equation

the sound of thought / is enlightenment / the magic light / of tomorrow
backwards / are those of sadness / forward and onward / are those of gladness

enlightenment is / my tomorrow / we have no claims / for sorrow
hereby / my invitation / I do invite you / here of my space world

the song is sound / of enlightenment / the fiery truth / of enlightenment
vibrations / sent from the space world / is of the cosmic / starry dimension

enlightenment is / my tomorrow / have no claims / for sorrow
hereby / our invitation / we do invite you / here of our space world (3x)