TAUTITOTITO (DISPUTATION SONGS)

Music Theater by Celeste Oram
17 + 18 July 2018, 15.00 – 18.30
Centralstation (Saal)

Tautitotito (Disputation Songs): Another Genealogy of Aotearoa New Zealand Music (2018) – World Premiere / Commissioned by the Darmstadt Summer Course

A piece by Celeste Oram in collaboration with Alex Taylor, Rob Thorne, Keir GoGwilt, and Madison Greenstone; and featuring Nina Guo, Caroline Miller, Barbara Byers, Kyle Motl, Luc Werner, Sebastian Gwilt, Ine Vanoeveren, and Weston Olencki.

Celeste Oram, Kranichstein Music Prize Winner for Composition in 2016, imagines in a poetic, critical and yet humorous way an unauthorized musical history for her home country of New Zealand:
“Tautitotito: to compose music, to compose poetry, to compose stories. To speak and sing in response to the stories told by others. In the spirit of waiata tautitotito – disputation songs – this long-form music-theatre work re-enacts, re-constructs, and re-imagines Aotearoa New Zealand’s musical histories as a way of laying down a challenge to the habitual myths of colonial history and nationhood. ‘Tautitotito’ is the result of over two years of research, collaboration, and creative exchange involving artists from Aotearoa and the United States. It is a multilingual, polystylistic cabaret show, tracing spirals through time to weave experimental amateur radio broadcasts, anarchist serialism, a hardcore postwar lecture-recital, folk song, taonga pūoro, 18th-century Singspiel, and sonic landscapes of nonhuman creatures into a musical genealogy which acknowledges the past, honours the present, and dreams futures into resounding life.” (Celeste Oram)

For information on Celeste Oram, click here.