Film Love and Bent Frequency present

"brilliantly weird and wildly intriguing and fun"
- Pierre Ruhe on the music and film of Mauricio Kagel

Curated by Robert Ambrose, Andy Ditzler and Stuart Gerber
Co-sponsored by the Center for Collaborative and International Arts at Georgia State University

Musician as actor, composer as filmmaker, film as concert – the works of Mauricio Kagel constantly upend conventions and expectations. Often, his compositions are actually theater pieces, except played by virtuoso musicians in a concert hall rather than actors in a theater. He instructed musicians to play guitars with fan blades and coffee mills, and constructed giant instruments in which musicians were encased.

In addition to creating a vast compositional output, Kagel doubled as a film director, with typically mindblowing results. Together with the contemporary music ensemble Bent Frequency, Film Love is proud to present two evenings of films and music highlighting the creative, subversive, and fascinating work of a key figure in twentieth-century music.

February 18 at Eyedrum, Film Love presents an exceedingly rare screening of Kagel’s film Two-Man Orchestra. Two musicians are inserted into Kagel’s specially built one-man-band setups (of over 250 instruments!) which they control with their fingers, feet, legs, heads and any other possible way. Trapped in these enormous, overgrown constructions and dealing with their unpredictable malfunctions, the performers evoke everything from Charlie Chaplin to circus music to complete atonality in a virtuoso physical and musical feat.

In Program 2, two short films accompany two live performances at Georgia State University’s Rialto Center for the Arts. *PROGRAM 2 is postponed due to inclement weather and will be rescheduled as soon as possible. In Antithese, a hapless studio engineer becomes entangled in technology, leading to a comically disastrous climax. Unter Strom features traditional – and not-so-traditional – instruments played with industrial and kitchen equipment rather than human hands, resulting in paradoxically delicate and fragile sounds. Bent Frequency performs Match, one of Kagel’s most famous works, involving two cellists in what seems to be more of a contest than a duet, complete with a percussionist serving as referee.


PROGRAMS

Program 1:
February 18 (at Eyedrum)
Zwei-Mann-Orchester (Two-Man Orchestra) (film, 1973, 71 minutes)

Program 2:
Antithese (film, 1965, 19 minutes)
Schattenklänge (Shadow Sounds) (1995) performed by Kenneth Long, bass clarinet
Unter Strom (Undercurrent) (film, 1975, 20 minutes)
Match (1964) performed by Craig Hultgren and Nan Kemberling, cellos and Stuart Gerber, percussion


VENUES

The Rialto Center for the Arts, Georgia State University
80 Forsyth Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30303
(on the corner of Forsyth and Luckie streets)
Directions and parking
Email arts @ gsu dot edu to reserve seats

Eyedrum
290 Martin Luther King Jr Dr Suite 8, Atlanta, GA 30312
www.eyedrum.org


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