Stefan Keller: Elektras Tanz

About the aesthetics

With my music I strive for the most comprehensive experience possible, which also encompasses the unconscious, irrational sides of human existence that are marked by emotion. An important role is therefore played on the one hand by the immediate physical effect of rhythm and sound, and on the other hand by the work with musical languages, which takes up the familiar and continues to think in new directions. This focus on the social and emotional qualities of music means that when composing, I do not refer solely to new music or to the tradition of European art music, but potentially to any kind of music that speaks to me and touches me. Depending on the piece, this also includes North Indian classical music, which I have approached by learning to play the tabla and singing the khyal.

(Stefan Keller)

 

Electra’s dance

Dance is often described as a game with gravity, whose apparent overcoming or sovereign mastery is striven for; accordingly as lightness, an expression of will to live and joy. For me, on the other hand, Elektra’s dance is about a paradoxical simultaneity of extremely contradictory, opposing feelings and states: a heaviness that can hardly be borne, which nevertheless produces a swaying levitation a pain-distorted inability to let go and a feeling of powerlessness, which, however, produce a tremendous urge and a furor; a tenderness that turns into aggressiveness. The figure of Elektra, who mourns her murdered father and is obsessed with thoughts of revenge against her mother, symbolizes such an extreme state of human being.

(Stefan Keller)