PAINTING SCHUBERT
Interdisciplinary collaboration with Yugen Trio, Judith von Radetzky and a team of musicians, actors and visual artists.
Details
Painting Schubert was conceived as an interdisciplinary performance experience around the music of Franz Schubert.
The work combines live music, theatre, text, movement, live painting and visual arts. One of its central elements is the direct relationship between music and painting: the painter works in real time while listening to the music, while the creative process is filmed and simultaneously projected into the space.
The audience does not only see a finished painting, but also its process of creation. The act of painting becomes a moving image, expanding from the canvas into the architecture.
Within this collaboration, Marjorie Chau developed the visual and spatial concept of the production. Her work included visual artistic direction, video projection, lighting concept, composition of the performance space and costume.
The projections were not used as a decorative background, but as a visual architecture that surrounded the action and connected painting, music, bodies and space.
Each version of Painting Schubert was specifically adapted to the architecture in which it was presented. Whether in a church, an industrial space or a conventional theatre, images, light and bodies were reorganised to create a dialogue with the characteristics of each location.
| Year | 2022 |
|---|---|
| Format | Staged concert / interdisciplinary performance / immersive visual experience |
| Media | Live classical music, live painting, theatre, text, movement, video projection, lighting, performance space, visual elements and costume |
| Music | Franz Schubert |
| Original Concept | Juan María Raso Llarás |
| Marjorie Chau’s Role | Visual artistic direction, spatial concept, video projection, lighting concept, performance space and costume |
| Main Collaborators: | Yugen Trio, Judith von Radetzky, actors, painters and the production’s audiovisual team |
| Documented Locations | Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche, Berlin; Theater Pfütze, Nuremberg; Kühlhaus Berlin |
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Painting Schubert explores how music can be transformed into a visual, physical and spatial experience.
The project begins with a direct relationship between sound and image. While Yugen Trio performs the music of Franz Schubert, a painter responds by creating a painting live. This process is filmed and projected simultaneously, making the act of creation itself visible.
The painting is no longer limited to a physical surface. Gesture, colour and form are enlarged through video projection and begin to inhabit the surrounding space.
The work also incorporates theatre, text and movement, creating a dialogue between different disciplines unfolding simultaneously around the music.
Within this interdisciplinary structure, Marjorie Chau’s research focused particularly on the relationship between image, architecture and perception.
The visual concept was designed to transform according to each location. Projections responded to the surfaces, proportions, heights and architectural characteristics of each space.
At Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche, the images interacted with the verticality and monumental scale of the church. At Kühlhaus Berlin, projections could move across the floor and ceiling, creating a completely different experience. In a conventional theatre, the visual composition had to be reorganised again within a more frontal relationship between audience and stage.
In this way, Painting Schubert did not depend on a fixed set. Each architecture became an active part of the work.
Marjorie Chau’s contribution was precisely to create this immersive dimension: translating Schubert’s musical and emotional world into an experience where light, projection, painting, bodies, costume and space could function as a single visual landscape.