Crowd

To the soundtrack of a rave party created by Peter Rehberg on the decks, we watch the bodies of 15 young dancers form themselves into an endless series of images in very slow motion.

With a background that includes film, Giselle Vienne creates an astonishingly precise score with movements in place of notes. Each of the movements is informed by a particular cinematic effect—like slow motion, freeze frame, or the ‘jerky’ repetition of a gif file.

The flow of the movements is interrupted, then sets off afresh in a different direction. These ongoing “tableaux vivants” reveal the ecstatic, almost religious, dimension of enjoyment, but also the entirely unconscious violence inherent in i—a liberating, fertility-bringing violence like that of some ancient ritual. Unfamiliar but surprisingly beautiful, the “Crowd” draw the gaze like a magnet.

Looking back at the early 90s, when she first surrendered herself to Berlin's clubbing and theatre scene, Gisèle Vienne invites the celebrated electronic music composer Peter Rehberg to choose the tracks for the rave party in “Crowd” soundtrack.

Peter Rehberg, composer and founder of the Éditions Mego label, was awarded the Ars Electronica in 1999, the year in which Gisèle Vienne made her directorial debut.

Rehberg selects a series of recordings which clearly reference the Detroit scene, along with tracks by, among others, Jeff Mills, Underground Resistance and Drexciya, which defined the sound of Berlin's club scene, and music he himself wrote in collaboration with Stephen O'Malley of Sunn O))). These sounds, which have accompanied our lives for thirty years now as they have made their way out of the rave underground into more mainstream appearances in the soundscape of our contemporary everyday, provide the first of Crowd's defining axes.

The second axis is the dramaturgy of the author Dennis Cooper, Gisèle Vienne's creative partner since 2004. Having made his name with the five autobiographical novels that form the "George Miles" Cycle, the New York writer, poet, critic and curator has served as a role model for many younger writers. His work contain numerous references to the underground and independent musical scenes, with which he has close ties.