Call it a musical, a “musical drama” or a “folk opera” – the theatrical music-maker Nina Hynes doesn’t care what you name it, just enter into the experience and watch the speculation unfold. “It’s got dance, it’s got theatre, it’s got a script as well,” she says.
Emerging from a Coronazeit collaboration with a dancer that since fizzled out, I am the machine is the result of the desire to continue to write music for and with dancers like Orla McCarthy, Hynes’ choreographer for this performance. Indeed, Hynes – a long-time folk musician – has always seen her music-making as performative, harkening back to her early days when she was surrounded by stage designers.
“It’s an experience,” she says, elaborating on her gig philosophy. “And I always try to make it a connective experience for everybody who is there.” Confronting what she calls “living the sci-fi” – our current status quo where we are “watching wars online” and where we “bring out little devices everywhere we go”, I am the machine served as “a kind of therapy” for Hynes, who has also been studying coding as she made this project.
Her exploration of the next step in humanity’s relationship with technology will take the stage with three dancers, a five-piece band and the support of the Irish Embassy’s cultural program, Zeitgeist 24.
- I am the machine on Nov 29, 30 & Dec 1 at DOCK 11, Kastanienallee 79, Prenzlauer Berg, in English, details.
