Ari Benjamin Meyers: Forecast

Performance

Großes Haus
Premiere 23.04.20

American artist and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers works at the intersection of music, theatre, performance and live installation, seeking to exploit each different genre’s special register and make new connections between their various modes of action.

His latest work, Forecast, is dedicated to the weather as both a phenomenon and a starting off point for an evening about predictability and humans as the inventors of the future with their need for prognoses and imagination.

We humans have tried to contain the capriciousness of the weather, its play with extremes, within the shape of gods and metaphysical powers. At the same time, the weather seems to us to be an pronouncement from nature that we interpret, comment on and seek to capture with measuring instruments and calculations. But aren’t our scientific and metrological efforts themselves just another method and form for creating a narrative for the weather, namely the natural laws that explain the unexplainable? In the Anthropocene, we’re now faced with the question: aren’t the cards dealt in an entirely different way? Aren’t we actors ourselves in the game of nature and don’t we have to take responsibility for something that we can’t estimate? Or to misquote Hildegard von Bingen: Isn’t the weather the forecast itself?

Cast
With: Johanna Bantzer, Ursula Werner
Musicians: Nico van Wersch (guitar, band leader), Liam Byrne (viola da gamba), Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir (harp), Susanne Fröhlich (recorder), Hilary Jeffery (trombone), Thomsen Merkel (electric bass), Jan Terstegen (electric guitar)

Direction, composition, text, concept: Ari Benjamin Meyers
Text, research, concept: Wannes Gyselinck
Text and concept: Arved Schultze
Stage design: Eva Veronica Born
Costumes: Lea Søvsø
Musical direction and compositional assistance: Nico van Wersch
Lighting: Kevin Sock

Visit the performance website