Dance Recital

Dance Recital is a concert with one harpsichord and one dancer on stage. The concert can be performed in different spaces and contexts. In autumn 2020 Dance Recital was performed at the German Church in the programme of Helsinki Early Music Festival and during summer 2021 at Oulunsalo Soi festival’s programme at Valvesali, Oulu.

William Byrd’s (c. 1540-1623) and Girolamo Frescobaldi’s (1583-1643) harpsichord pieces will be heard side by side in this concert. The turn of the 17th century is often seen as a switch from the “old” to the “new”. In music this can mean e.g. the transition of emphasis from the carefully structured polyphony to the rhetoric monodia: the affective solo songs. Byrd’s and Frescobaldi’s pieces reflect this turning point. Pieces by Byrd take often forms of the renaissance dances, often you hear the cosmos with its planets and their eternal tactus; in Frescobaldi’s toccatas the harpsichord starts speaking in a human language, in a desiring and declamative mode. The power of the music acts in the levels of the universe and a human body: it moves both celestial bodies and body liquids.

In the early baroque period people thought that musical sound is a substance that affects the body and alters the liquid balances in the body by means of vibrating air. Henriksson and Mustonen are searching for a way to allow these ideas to be sensed and shared in a performance situation. Both listening to and playing music can come out as dancing.

Credits

Harpsichord: Marianna Henriksson
Choreography and dance: Anna Mustonen