“Everything bounces everywhere
with almost no loss.”
Echo is a sensory performance by Post uit Hessdalen and the Zwerm guitar quartet. The two companies share an adventurous and elusive approach of their artistic disciplines. Starting out from the age-old myth of Echo, they interweave their own preferences in sound and image live on stage. Together they seek out the resonances, associations and memories that lie concealed in the places where the wood-nymph Echo found herself after being cursed. In Echo both music and video are presented live on stage, thus immersing the audience. As a modern nymph, the dancer Charlotte Goesaert guides the audience on a sensory trip in which video images created on the spot, invisible light, and elusive colours play the leading parts. Together they bring the set to life as a growing body, driven onward by the compelling soundscape created by the musicians of Zwerm.
Everything was forever, until it was no more
How does an ancient Greek story find its resonance today? Today’s Echo resonates online on servers in Mons, South Carolina or the Pacific Ocean, rather than among majestic mountains and in deep valleys. Our present virtual identity, which we have thoughtlessly thrown online, links our fate to that of the punished forest nymph: we, too, continue to exist whether we like it or not, stored as ones and zeros on one of the millions of servers somewhere worldwide. We will never again be able to silence our own digital seeds, despite the recent ruling by the European Court of Justice on ‘the right to be forgotten’. Echo questions how we should deal with this virtual remembering.
After we stretched our hall-sized curtain over the heads of the audience in Belgium and the Netherlands, we carefully folded it up. This show has not been performed since 2017.
