Performance: Peasants in Atmosphere & Lada Choir
Length: 45 minutes
Free entrance
Founded by visual artist Dominika Trapp, the Hungarian conceptual music project Peasants in Atmosphere will join forces with the women’s folklore ensemble Lada for an experimental concert performance.
The Prague-based women’s folklore ensemble Lada Choir and the Hungarian conceptual music project Peasants in Atmosphere join forces for a concert-performance that will fill the Grand Hall of National Gallery with songs of hard work and solidarity in the fields, ballads about the lives of rural women, and the experimental sounds of the viola, the modular synthesizer, and other instruments. This will be the first encounter between two groups who both approach folk music with a desire to experiment but also wish to honor and learn from this traditional culture. The concert-performance takes the installation of the Hungarian visual artist Dominika Trapp as its point of departure, whose work engages with the experiences of peasant women in patriarchal rural societies, focusing on their emancipatory gestures of resistance.
This event is part of the program of the first day of the Biennale opening weekend.
Peasants in Atmosphere was founded by Dominika Trapp in 2017 as a conceptual band, with the intention of creating a dialogue between folk music and experimental music communities who are often separated from each other for cultural, political, geographical, or other reasons. The project draws on historical movements like the early Hungarian avant-garde (among others, Béla Bartók and Lajos Kassák), who turned to vernacular peasant culture for the possibility of intellectual renewal, and aims to evoke the countercultural heritage of the Hungarian folk revival movement of the 1970s and 1980s. The name Peasants in Atmosphere is inspired by the title of a poem written by the avant-garde poet József Lengyel in 1917. It is meant as an act of self-criticism, recognizing how artists appropriate and arbitrarily stage the culture of the defenseless peasantry as part of a certain atmosphere. The band itself is no longer active; the project exists in the form of temporary constellations that come together for different occasions.
Musicians:
Márton Bertók – electronics
Bertók is a Budapest-based electronic instrument builder and musician, who explores the realm between organic and synthetic sounds. His primary instrument is a modified Buchla Music Easel, one of the first modular systems created for live performance.
Áron Porteleki – multi-instrumentalist
Porteleki is a drummer, violist, and sound artist from Budapest, who experiments with free improv, folk, noise, acoustic, and electronic music as well as movement-based projects.
Lada is a Prague-based women’s collective dedicated to the vocal interpretation of Moravian and Slovak folklore. The ensemble was formed in 2015, but its essence is based on deep friendships dating back to the mid-1990s and shared experience in a children’s choir. The repertoire, which consists mainly of songs of feminine nature – ballads, love songs, and outdoor songs – is carefully selected by members from each region and processed with respect for the character of folkloric expression and local traditions. The ensemble performs songs both a cappella and accompanied by musical instruments, including violin, viola, bass, accordion, and occasionally dulcimer. Apart from its own concerts, Lada also collaborates extensively with other musical, theatrical, and visual artists, and last year the ensemble released its debut album Všelijake kvety.
Singers: Anežka Heinzlová, Klára Fleková, Magdalena S. Havlová, Veronika Omastová, Marie Tučková, Naďa Buchtová, Renata Nedělová, Marta Ebenová
Instagram: @lada_sbor