tropen

Often as not, when Reinhold Friedl applies himself to the keys of his baby grand, it no longer sounds like a piano. His physically demanding playing technique, which redefines the instrument, seems somewhat bizarre, resembling more a kind of dance and, in the end, leaving the pianist just as exhausted and soaked in sweat as the dancer Dieter Baumann.

Baumann’s movements are generated from individual body parts, from the arms, the shoulders, the head, the pelvis and the legs. Bauman and Friedl have chosen the term “Tropen” as the starting point for their new duet for good reasons: in musical theory, it describes song structure, the rhetoric “trope” has the task of preventing uniformity of expression and listener fatigue. The 10 resulting songs in TROPEN are assembled to an almost chamber music-like cycle, the singing body and the dancing piano, sound machine and body intermingle to create an extremely exhilarating movement experience.

The dancer becomes a chamber singer – the singer is the body – always in close dialogue with the pianist. The sound machine and the body meet in a reduced way, simultaneously wild and disciplined