Since 2010, the duo kolberg+stern has been exploring worlds of sound and combining contemporary music with poetry and performance elements:
Invisible Dark Matter
performance / concert / live projection, premiere at Black Box, cuba cultur, Münster 2015, latest show gallery hase29, Osnabrück 2020
In this audiovisual project, everything revolves around the invisible dark matter, which holds together not only the cosmos, but also our everyday life at its very core. Dark matter is not only a physical phenomenon. Poets use it as a metaphor for the invisible forces that guide us: gravity and love, longing and (in-)finity. A handpicked selection from the treasure chest of North American poetry transforms into melancholic and beautiful songs weaving a connection between inner and outer space. The musical spectrum covers spoken words and singing, jazz ballad and noise cascades, hard grooves and delicate soundscapes. And the aquarium from our first show ‘Songs of Life and Death’ is back on stage, too, filled with new objects…based loosely on poems by E. E. Cummings, Frederick Seidel, Carl Adamshick, Wyn Cooper, Matthew Rohrer, Alicia Ostriker and with lyrics by kolberg+stern
Michael Kolberg (guitars), Anna Stern (vocals) and Michael Schneider (live video projection)
Songs of Life and Death
Performance/concert/live projection, premiere Theater im Pumpenhaus Münster 2012, last performance 2023 Center for Literature, Havixbeck
Songs of Life and Death is a one-hour musical and visual rollercoaster ride through the short and intense life of US-American poet Anne Sexton, a gripping mixture of concert, reading and live projection. Michael Kolberg (electric guitars) and Anna Stern (reading, singing, live projection) transform some of her best poems into moving songs. Guitar grooves alternate with floating sounds and looping cascades of noise, the voice speaks, sings, conjures, flirts, dies and rises again. The two performers act in front of a moving background and are simultaneously part of the image: an aquarium on stage is filled with rising, floating and sinking objects and substances that appear as a live projection on a screen. The dimensional change lends objects and texts a new and alienating level of meaning. The performance has been shown many times since 2012 - with and without projection - to enthusiastic audiences between 17 and 77, including at the Poetry Festival Münster, Theater im Pumpenhaus, Münster, Kunsthaus Essen, Haus Kannen, Ruller Haus Osnabrück, Center for Literature Burg Havixbeck.
Transfer#1
Site-specific performance, Performance Art Festival BRISE°3, Flensburg 2015
The performance took place in the Hans-Christiansen-Haus, a former school that is now part of Flensburg's Museum Hill. We responded to the building's scholastic past on the one hand and its current acoustics on the other: at the beginning, the audience was given white A4 sheets of paper printed with an excerpt from the almost anti-educational poem 'Rechenstunde' by Jacques Prévert (see excerpt below) and asked to fold paper airplanes out of them. We then wandered through the corridors and stairwell with recording devices and recorded the echoes of our own clicking sounds. At a signal, the audience threw the paper airplanes from the top floor down into the stairwell and then entered the auditorium with us. Here we fed the sounds we had just recorded into a looper, creating a carpet of sound to which we improvised vocally and instrumentally. A similar acoustic re-transformation to the one described in the poem took place: The auditorium of the former school was seemingly transformed into a natural space, a cave full of falling drops of water and whirring sounds.
And the window panes become sand again
the ink becomes water again
the desks become trees again
the chalk becomes rocks again
the penholder becomes a bird again.
