DD Dorvillier & Zeena Parkins / Danza Permanente & Captiva

When Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, op. 132 in Vienna almost two centuries ago, the composer was almost completely deaf. For Danza Permanente, choreographer DD Dorvillier and composer Zeena Parkins have translated compositional structures and tonal qualities of the score into dance movements. The four dancers are each assigned to one of the four instruments. The choreography follows the musical notation down to the finest nuances and interweaves the dancing voices into an intense and dynamic stream of movement. The dancers are music made visible without the music being audible.

New York multi-instrumentalist Zeena Parkins is a pioneer of contemporary harp-playing. In the second part of the evening she presents her latest composition, Captiva, at Tanzquartier Wien. The Captiva pieces are based on a system of simple rules that, when combined, offer unlimited possibilities of musical development. Following a cosmic pattern, each individual sound makes space for the next. Captiva evolves with each concert, containing all past versions while pointing to future ones at the same time.