The Haunting of Mount Everest
A review of In Situ – Festival for Explorative Sound and Performance.
On a nice, sunny day, walking around Ørestad – a utopian urban planning experiment gone (somewhat) wrong – feels a bit like being stuck inside an architectural 3D render. On a dark, rainy night, though, it looks like a place straight out of the old Bladerunner.
That unassuming Thursday evening when we went to In Situ – Festival for Explorative Sound and Performance, the rain was falling hard, and the cold, dreary weather only intensified the district’s dystopian aura. The highway overpass led us from the metro station to two tall, black towers, their silhouettes barely visible in the rain.
“Is this it?”
“I mean, this has to be it.”
We shrugged as we stared into the indoor forest of Crowne Plaza Hotel’s colossal foyer, carefully entering through the revolving door. According to the signalization, we were supposed to head over to Mount Everest… The Mount Everest conference room.
The first performance of the evening had already started. On this occasion, the loose collective of the Union for Open Vocalism was represented by three performers. Francesca Burattelli, Claus Haxholm, and Jacob Kaarsberg performed a new piece (which included contributions from other members of the group) making good use of the room and its spacious surroundings. The dim blue and green lights helped create an eerie mood that made it easy to forget what the usual purpose of the venue was. The trio walked around performing a mostly spoken-word piece over a lush musical backdrop featuring strings. By the end of the performance, they had permeated the audience – both vocally and physically, before turning down the lights and leaving the room.
Union for Open Vocalism’s impressive performance set the tone for the rest of the evening, at least in terms of opening up the space to play with the highly particular venue. In the following show, the British cellist and composer Lucy Railton played with the context in a slightly different way. After having dedicated the first part of her set to a captivating performance on cello, Railton stood up and moved to the table with electronics, setting up a more intense and noisy situation. At moments, the music almost seemed to reflect the aural ambiance of Ørestad and the nearby intersection of highway, metro line, and railway. Perhaps it was simply a noise from another place, considering that the artist had previously put out a “duet” with Berlin’s S-Bahn. Either way, the jump from classical to the noise made perfect sense not only for Railton’s own set but for the evening’s program as a whole, a perfect transition between its gentle introduction and its harrowing finale.
It was down to Frederikke Hoffmeier a.k.a. Puce Mary to close the first evening of the festival, and she did so in an expectedly loud fashion. On the one hand, it may have been totally weird to experience her noise assault while sitting in a cozy chair in a carpeted conference room. On the other hand, it was actually quite nice to at least feel physically comfortable while being exposed to challenging music. The acoustics were pretty good too!
It is precisely this difference between the selected music acts and the peculiar venue that produced tension which, in turn, made the event feel so fresh and interesting. The vast, empty halls of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, the whole bunch of plants in its gigantic foyer, and the stuck-up context of the conference area all provided a unique entry point for the artists to explore in executing their live sets. (The context also warranted an unusual situation in which the same “venue” hosted both an experimental sound festival and, um, a conference of Schengen Evaluation Police Cooperation.) And the dull, dry conference hall was ultimately turned into a totally decent performance venue.
It was obvious that In Situ didn’t treat the unusual concert setting merely as a necessity of organizing a festival in Ørestad; it bravely took on the weird venues and made it one of the festival’s central assets, with the remaining two days exploring the possibilities of two other local venues. Combined with bold programming and a smart lineup flow, the festival proved to be an exceptionally well-thought-through affair and an example of what can be achieved by thinking outside of the (festival booking) box.