ICEBERG

Together with Flat Earth Society

Coproduced by deSingel, Antwerp

On April 14th 2012 it will be exactly 100 years ago that the sinking of the Titanic occurred, and on that specific date the new production of FES and Champ d’Action will premiere in deSingel in Antwerp.

The sinking of the Titanic has become a part of the collective memory, appeals to everybody’s imagination, is a source of countless stories and has reached an iconic status. The sinking of the Titanic has become the almost universal metaphor for the human hubris. ‘The Titanic is unsinkable, sinking unthinkable’. We know better now, even though we seem to have learned nothing, the metaphor now turns from the ship to the iceberg, melting slowly but decisively.

In the first part of the new production ICEBERG, FES plays a new composition by Peter Vermeersch for soprano (Champ d’Action veteran and grande dame Rolande Van der Paal) and orchestra, on texts by Josse De Pauw. David Claerbout creates the images for the production. The public will hear the story of the iceberg through the voice of the singer, singing of her own fate. Subsequently, and as a slow sinking epilogue, Champ d’Action brings the legendary ‘Sinking of the Titanic’ by Gavin Bryars: originally written as a conceptual work, it soon became the prototype of Bryars’ elegiac mediations. The hymns, the Morse signals and underwater atmosphere get the typical and uncompromised Champ d’Action ‘sound’. The FES musicians join in delicately, as do the images of David Claerbout, until everything becomes unruffled and still. Ship gone, iceberg gone.

Ship and iceberg, connected by Archimedes’ principle:
‘a body immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid’

IMAGE : BASED ON THE WATERCOLOR ‘ICE’ BY © JORGE MACCHI, 2009

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