Den kreisrunden Todengwalzer tanzen
a video installation by Ines Birkhan & Bertram Dhellemmes
premiered in Mythen für die Zukunft, Cabaret Renz, Vienna, december 2005
This video work is a research in creating a hybrid media, a "video-novel" aiming to develop new forms of narrativity by combining differents field of arts – literature, dance, music and video. Here, images and sounds are not the supports of narration (which claims its rooting in the tradition of novel or even fable), but strongly influence its perception at the edge of consciousness, and also link reading to the temporality of audiovisual. In this interlacing of sensitive and intellectual perceptions, each element is carefully articulated to the others to elaborate a larger though still discreet experience.
In the “video-novels” series to which den kreisrunden Todengwalzer tanzen belongs, the combination of images, sounds and texts allows an exploration of an ‘extended field of literature’. It proposes a complexity of perception that requires the full involvement of the audience, as well as openness at different intellectual and emotional levels, thus renewing the fundamental experience of reading. A framed time for reading provides a musicality that is not limited to the audible but indeed in the structural perception of time. The images are not anymore the centre of the proposal but a sensitive background that prepare the reception of the text, and the music is building a homogeneous environment. The fictional universe built by the narrative is also composite, making myth and modernity one, linking fairytale and social concern, and this reflects in the language used, a creative extrapolation both familiar and strange.
