RENAN MARTINS
HANGHANG (2012)
P.A.R.T.S. Graduation Tour
“No, it wasn't a conscious choice at all. Once we started developing our own music and we had found this sound that was ours, we realized that there was something magically under-said about it. I mean, as soon as you start putting words into music like ours, you kind of tie the meaning of it down and you lose something. With our music, its completely open to interpretation, and so listeners can have their own experience with it.” Nick Mulvey (Hang Drum Player in Portico Quartet)
“HangHang” is the fourth in a series. It deals with an unnameable 4th element produced by the idea of Narration, the idea of Abstraction and the work on Vocabulary. With the use of “Isla” (Album by Portico Quartet) a meaningful yet dry piece is created. A certain atmosphere comes up from the combination of a vocabulary that is generated by personal events of the performers and the exhaustion of material through repetition. Different layers are felt but not explicitly revealed. This submersion of meaning relates to a life time where one goes through different processes of learning, acknowledgment and reflection. Mostly one acts on intuition but despite the clarity and seeming inevitability of the decision one makes in the moment, the responses or consequences to these intuitive
actions are still, somehow, unexpected.
In 'HangHang' Anne-Laure Dogot and Renan Martins de Oliveira work with the music of Portico Quartet. An English band that composes music using the Hang, a contemporary Swiss Instrument meant to be played intuitively, with no formalized educational approach. The Hanghang (plural of hang) make repetitive, cyclical patterns, underneath which
the double-bass harmonizes.
The resulting sound is warm and resonant.
Artistic direction
Renan Martins
Made with and by
Anne-Laure Dogot and Renan Martins
Music
Portico Quartet
Costumes
Suzanne Groothuis
Lights
Joris De Bolle
Special Thanks to Nathalie Wahlberg and Nora Virgili Garcia who participated in the beginning of our research.
And to Chrysa Parkinson, Pierre Droulers, Salva Sanchis, Spela Vodeb and Victor Perez Armero.