From 12 July we were at the three day Ethno HISTeRIA festival which was held in the forest at Gračišče in the beautiful Istria region of the country. Along a one kilometre path outside the village there were all kinds of installations, and several stages and other locations had been prepared by a big group of young volunteers for the many performers from all over the world who had come to play, sing and perform together.
There were puppeteers, actors, jugglers as well as musicians – an enormous programme of all kinds of evening events as well as daytime workshops where performers could share their knowledge and demonstrate their expertise. The 70 strong ‘Orchestra Ethno Histeria’ made up of young musicians from many countries had been sharing their traditional music and playing together for the preceeding two weeks. They performed in the open air on the main stage; our performances took place nearby in the canvas-covered ‘electric stage’.
As these photos show, this was being erected when we arrived. It was a very interesting and unusual location for Tagtooling –
in the evening all of the images projected onto the canvas could be seen from the outside of the tent and once darkness fell the whole structure really glowed both inside and out.
We began our programme on Friday evening with Jan and me using two Tagtools for our drawing to accompany Matthias Groß from Leipzig and two of his friends, Kathryn Doehner (violin) and Frederik Mikael Mattsson (saxophone) in their improvised electronic session…
…and below here are some stills from our first ‘official’ Tagtool performance at the festival as ‘Ateliér Libušín and friends’ – the ‘friends’ being Jan, David and Max from Vienna, three musicians whose work I find really inspiring and with whom we have worked on many previous occasions.
Jan and David played their own set on Saturday evening and I drew (using two Tagtools and three projectors – a complicated set up for me that involved switching pens from one Wacom drawing tablet to the other in order to develop different parts of my drawing, but by working in this way it was possible for the projection to cover nearly one half of the geodome structure of the tent). Below is a sequence of images from this performance; Dima also made a video recording which I will post later.
No Comments