ALBUM, the muse at work 

by Naïma Mazic/ n ï m company  

with Evi Filippou 

Tickets can be purchased from the Brut website: https://brut-wien.at

Ticket Sale Date: September 20, 2023 

 

 

ALBUM, the muse at work by dancer/choreographer Naïma Mazic with percussionist/vibraphonist Evi Filippou and a record player, is based on nine of endless songs named after romantic partners of jazz musicians or written by female composers. Hear and now: polyrhythmic choreographies of care and inspiration. Informed by the divine figure of the muse, ALBUM manipulates her position, questioning the patriarchal utilization of reproductive labor. n ï m company shares a record of nine love stories by co-musing with Carla Bley, Moki Cherry, Mary Lou Williams and more.

Being named after a ballad, growing up in a jazz club and a BigBand, dancer/choreographer Naïma Mazic started to investigate songs that she felt drawn to dance to – endless tunes named after women, dedicated to romantic partners that are managers, producers, mothers, artists and jazz musicians themselves. ALBUM is an interaction between these songs and the music written by female composers. Shared polyrhythmic choreographies between dance and music, together with percussionist/vibraphonist Evi Filippou and a record player, tell stories of creative and reproductive labor and the patriarchal structures that distort them. The music itself is a container for the choreographic material to re-perform vocabularies of “musing”/ the archetypal ‘feminine’ (e.g. care, motherhood,…), postures and gestures from depictions of muses and “transcribing” biographical material of specific jazzmuses into dance. 

ALBUM, the muse at work Trailer by Damian Charles

Music (live or recorded) and dance exist on their own and simultaneously hold a multidimensional, flirtatious relationship. In jazz music there are innumerable interpretations of the same composition. The individual expression of the same or “The changing same” as Amiri Baraka formulates in Black Music. One can hear a history of displacement, of labor and self-fragmentation within the polyrhythmic Black American music. How can we listen closer? 

 

What does it mean to arrange a jazz tune through dance and space?

The performers’ bodies, movements, and musicality shift from tune to tune, from A side to B side, to contain a relationship that swings from intimate to professional and inspiring to possessive. The piece unfolds as a dramaturgy of a concert, yet between nine tracks, narratives emerge, passing through New York Jazz clubs, Viennese bedrooms, and your living room. One ballad composed to seduce- the melody of another love story. Communing with the goddess, arranging scores of text, biography, and feminist utopias.

The image of the muse remains heteronormative in that she is connected to the world of male desire, but her own – perhaps queer – female desire is forgotten and she stays a silent figure that inspires and stimulates.

ALBUM proposes co-musing as a politic of care.

We celebrate the women that have been lazily mythologized, just as the nine divine muses:

We celebrate the women who have inspired songs.

We celebrate the women who have written songs.

We celebrate the women who cleaned the rooms in which songs were composed. 

Director, Concept, Choreography, Dance: Naïma Mazic

Vibraphone, Drums, Percussion & Musical Arrangements: Evi Filippou

Music by: Mary Lou Williams, Carla Bley, Charlie Haden, Alice Coltrane, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, mathias rüegg, Lil’ Hardin Armstrong

Dramaturgy, Co-Concept: Maeve Johnson

Stagedesign, Research: Hanna Naske

Concept development: Is Ali

Costume Design: Naïma Mazic

Costumes: Tamara Yael & Gabriela Reyna

Dance Coaching: Cat Paz Jimenez

Outside Eyes: Sara Ostertag & Vera Rivas

Musicologist: Harald Kisiedu

Production: more2rhythm, Naïma Mazic & Senem Kahraman

Co-production: brut Wien 

Thank you

Alaa Alkurdi, Makisig Akin & Anya Cloud, Robyn Schulkowsky, Golnar Shahyar

Supported by: BMÖKKS Austria, MA7 Vienna, Porgy & Bess Jazz & Musicclub Vienna, Bears in the Park Vienna, LAKE Studios Berlin 

 

Photos by Tamara Yael, Hanna Naske, Maria Kousi

Teaser made by Damian Charles

Poster made by Is Ali