Natacha Diels (USA) – Solo
Somewhere beautiful
Thursday 13/4/23, 6pm
PROJECT ARTS CENTRE
Duration: 60 mins
PROGRAMME:
Natacha Diels, Somewhere Beautiful (2022)*
Natacha Diels, Untitled Piece for Drawing Machine (2022)*
Natacha Diels, The God-Fearing Woodsman (2022)*
* Irish Premiere
PERFORMERS:
Natacha Diels with Andy Ingamells, Maeve Kelly, Darragh Kelly and Jess McColgan.
In this one-person show, and her first performance in Ireland, Natacha Diels, creates Somewhere Beautiful – her unique vision of musical performance as a multimedia music theatre. The performance is like a journey into a strange landscape occupied by sounds and images that are at once both familiar and strange, reassuring and unsettling.
Natacha conjures an aural and visual panorama populated by what seems like familiar figures and half-remembered fairy tales. Together, the music, electronic sounds, video and performance render a simulacrum of what seems like your own memories – a nostalgia for the recent past.
This is somewhere beautiful.
There is a mountain, and a moonrise.
There is not much shade.
Sometimes, there are flowers.
Sometimes, there are birds.
On the other side, there is a bridge.
This bridge goes somewhere beautiful.
“[A] fairy tale for a fractured world.” (Music We Care About)
Natacha Diels' work combines choreographed movement, video animation, instrumental practice, and cynical play to create worlds of curiosity and unease. Recent and upcoming work includes Papillon and the Dancing Cranes, for construction cranes and giant butterfly (Borealis Festival 2018, Dear Antwerp 2021); OK Fantastic! for Talea Ensemble; and Somewhere Beautiful, a solo performance project (Klangspuren Festival 2022).
She is currently working on a 6-part TV-style miniseries with the JACK quartet, existing as short films and as performances. These pieces have been screened on a billboard truck driving through NYC, performed at Banff Centre for the Arts, and will receive its full premiere at the Annenberg Centre in 2024 (Philadelphia).
With a focus on collage, magic of the virtual, and the ritual of life as art, Natacha's compositions have been described as "the liveliest music of the evening" (LA Review of Books).
Natacha is a founding member of the composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse (est. 2003). Pamplemousse specializes in unique aspects of new music composition, from complex virtuosic instrumental performance to experimental theatre to electronic and robotic performance. She also teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
