Cobalt Garden

A choreographic concert

“There are thus lands without places and stories without chronology; there are cities, planets, continents, universes, which one could find on no map and nowhere in the sky, and that is simply because they belong to no space.”

With COBALT GARDEN, choreographer Stephanie Thiersch creates a haunting performance for three dancers and the Kölner Vokalensemble, enhanced by new compositions by the Japanese composer Malika Kishino. Baroque vocal art, contemporary dance and new music merge to form a multi-layered resonant space in which bodies, voices and sounds interpenetrate one another.
COBALT GARDEN explores the longing for an earthly Elysium – a place of harmony – whilst chaos simultaneously pushes to the surface. Light and shadow, vision and abyss lie in close proximity. Within this field of tension, breathing structures emerge, fragile intermediate realms, as if detached from Foucault’s utopian ‘realms’.
Musically, the production moves within the sphere of opera’s historical origins, where religious rigour and emotional explosion first encountered one another. Stylised polyphonic choral works are juxtaposed with new compositions inspired by recitations of Buddhist sutras. Alongside well-known works from the Baroque era – such as “Tistis est anima mea” by Gesualdo or “O nata lux” by Thomas Tallis – extraordinary madrigals by lesser-known female composers Francesca Caccini and Barbara Strozzi are performed.
COBALT GARDEN opens up a temporary space of possibility: a poetic yet fragile vision of how sound, movement and space interweave to form a utopian landscape.