Songs Without Places (Lieder ohne Orte)

Liquid Loft and PHACE bring Christoph Herndler’s composition Songs Without Places (Lieder ohne Orte) to REAKTOR

In December, contemporary music, performance and architecture once again converge in the latest production of SOIRÉE DANSANTE. Liquid Loft and PHACE transform REAKTOR into an immersive resonant space for Songs Without Places (Lieder ohne Orte), a choreographic work based on the eponymous composition by Austrian composer and artist Christoph Herndler. Moving between contemporary music, choreographic performance and visual composition, the work creates a form of music theatre that deliberately moves beyond conventional stage and performance formats.

At the centre of the work is Herndler’s graphic and intermedia score. It serves as the starting point for a live performance in which sound, movement and architecture are directly intertwined. Sounds, bodies and spatial structures enter into a continuous dialogue. Rather than experiencing the composition from a fixed spectator perspective, the audience moves through a constantly shifting spatial and acoustic environment.

With Songs Without Places, Liquid Loft and PHACE explore the experience of becoming lost: the disappearance of one’s origins, the uncertainty of arrival, and the question of what home means when familiar places lose their sense of certainty. Return emerges as a contradictory movement between memory and the future – a movement that never leads back to exactly the same place.

Songs Without Places evokes an idea of home that eludes geographical definition. Home appears simultaneously as memory, loss and possibility. Out of the familiar, a fragile in-between space emerges, in which belonging can be continually renegotiated.

With Christoph Herndler’s composition, Liquid Loft and PHACE continue their SOIRÉE DANSANTE series. REAKTOR once again becomes a site for an art form in which listening, seeing and physical perception converge, with the audience itself becoming part of the experience.