Choreography: Nacho Duato
Music: Stephan Micus
Settings: Walter Nobbe
Costumes: Nacho Duato
Light Design: Nicolás Fischtel
World premiere by Compañía Nacional
de Danza at Teatro de la Zarzuela
in Madrid, December 17th, 1994.
For some time, Stephan Micus has
been drawn by his fascination
for the instruments of other
cultures. It is not the creation
of exotic sounding effects
that interests him, but the
challenge to discover new sounds
and sound contexts. The process
of coasting sounds from Elmar
Daucher’s enormous blocks
of cut granite and serpentine
steels in combination with
flute and vocal music represented
an entirely new experience,
if only because they are not
tuned like “normal” instruments,
but contain most unusual tonal
intervals.
Ecos is built upon
this music, playing with different
symbolic values of this curious
sound material: on the one
hand, the huge buildings that
were built to immortalize their
creators, thus highlighting
their own insignificance, the
fleetingness and fragility
of their existences; those
stones, piled uptowards height
in order to be closer to God,
were in the end extremely attached
to earth, and in many cases,
became covered by it. It also
refers to the power or energy
of some megalithic elements
worshiped by remote or current
religions: man addresses his
prayers to a lifeless subject
which, in this way, becomes
the genesis of his spiritual
life. Perishable/timeless,
vain/magnificent, lifeless/alive,
matter/spirit,… these
dialectic binomials constitute
the inspiration of the spirit
of
Ecos.