Peter Lorenz
Dec 17, 2020


Currently lives and works in: Berlin (germany) / Innsbruck (Austria)

Practice: Director, Theatre- & Performance-Maker

I would like to upload a tree-trunk that I have in my garden but it seems impossible to do so neither photo, video nor audio recordings manage to capture its integrity.

You are invited to come by and have a look yourself.

Peter Lorenz works as a freelance director and performance-maker in theatre, opera and performance. He holds a degree in Theatre Studies from the University of Glasgow and has been working as an assistant and revival director for large scale opera productions e.g. with Scottish Opera, Vancouver Opera and the Bayreuth Festival. His own performances were shown mainly in the UK, the Balkans and the German-speaking-area, ranging from experimental musical theatre and solo choreographies to interactive installations. Peter cofounded the Street Arts Festival in Mostar in 2012 and the performance collective The Doing Group in Glasgow in 2015.

Areas of interest: Experimental theatre, contemporary opera, new performance formats

 

Past projects you are proud of:

Title: HOW DEEP IS THE SEA

Type: Experimental Soundtheatre

At the beach. The sound of waves. Sunset. Satisfied or pacified? From the distance we hear bomb shelling. Anything but peace. But at least far away. In the security of our sunbeds, we hardly notice the rough violence on the other side of all the seamless comfort – the apparent smoothness of reality. But the sea cannot be stopped. Neither the thoughts which tie us to our sunbeds.

The waves take us to distant shores and with humour and sound experiments we explore the edge between tourism and terrorism, promises and overwhelmedness.

 

Title: MORAG, YOU’RE A LONG TIME DEID

Type: Original music-based theatre

When Sam inherits her grandmother Morag’s piano, she finds a cryptic love letter made from lyrics of old Scottish ballads. Compelled by the intimate correspondence and the silence surrounding Morag’s suicide, Sam imagines a secret queer romance, and endeavours to uncover what her grandmother truly longed for. As the journeys of granddaughter and grandmother become musically intertwined, Sam transforms her ancestral songs, and in the process, discovers a voice of her own.

This new experimental musical warps, disrupts and reconfigures traditional Scottish storytelling and ballad singing. Compositions are playfully woven through live performance and electronic loops to tell old stories anew.

 

Title: TIME DUST

Type: Choreographic solo performance

Dust does not help us to remember, it reminds us that we have already forgotten. The choreography TIME DUST investigates the temporality of ruins and decay on the basis of dust. The dance of dust and mirror-fragments takes us into the fragile world of remnants and disturbs the dust which has settled on the memory of war and trauma. While searching, the future, the present and the past are burst in a haunting sound space. The disturbing excess of dust cannot be grasped – destruction and decay will eventually gain the upper hand.

TIME DUST’s simple movement language captures a sense of ruination and memory beyond words and speaks to audiences in affective images. The interplay between mirror-suit, dust and light creates ephemeral sculptures in the air. The choreography and soundscape intertwine and merge into a visual sound-choreography: the performer creates sounds with movements on and across the stage which are picked up by integrated microphones and transformed into complex soundscapes to which the movements react in turn again.

 

Title: MUZIKLAŽA

Type: Interactive sound installation

As part of the Austrian Artist Delegation funded by the Austrian Embassy in Sarajevo, we designed a three-day multi-arts workshop for the Street Arts Festival in Mostar. We used walking practices like drifting and soundwalking to explore the sonic character of the city of Mostar. The objects and materials found on our walks were upcycled into instruments and assembled into an interactive sound-installation in the abandoned ruin of the Old Library. Now, this transformed public sound-library invites passers-by to leave their ordinary walking routes and engage creatively with their living environment. The reappropriation and instrumentalisation of the trash in the installation represents a collective auditory reimagining of what is left behind in the city. The collaborative process is aimed at opening the participants’ perception of the city through sonic exploration, in order lead to a recovery of agency in shaping the city through its soundscape.

 

Title: The Ground Tour – Some Call Them Balkans & Some Call Us Balkans

Type: International public art collaboration project

Some Call Them Balkans is a transdisciplinary inquiry that since 2017 has explored and mobilised moments of collective imagination, research and multivocal representations of the Balkan region beyond borders and nationalisms. Today, the project has broadened its scope and this new phase has been named Some Call Us Balkans. On the basis of the initial collection and interrogation of myths and legends of contemporary Balkans, a mobile and travelling forum is imagined as a platform for questioning, discussing and imagining different narratives of the region that defy the constraints of national borders and ethnic separation. The journey of the mobile forum is orchestrated as a travelling theatre piece and meant to resonate transnationally through the creation of an interactive online platform, where the collected stories and dialogue, in between the travellers and locally based entities involved, will be the narrative base for the growing transnational community of socially engaged entities, communities, artists, activists, researchers and professionals active in the cultural field. Previous iterations of the work-in-progress project have been presented in the form of exhibitions, workshops and publications at the Interkulturelles Zentrum Vienna (AT), Urbanize Festival Vienna (AT), University of Applied Arts of Vienna (AT), University of Florence (IT), Venice Biennale Educational Program (IT), Biennale of Western Balkans in Ionnina (GR).

 

MagiC Carpets project: Invisible Cities Innsbruck

All of us live our own realities of Innsbruck. The process-oriented performance project INVISIBLE CITIES INNSBRUCK explores, documents and discusses these invisible city versions. The director and theatre-maker Peter Lorenz developed a participatory workshop performance in a pizza box together with The Doing Group and local artists. He delivered this performance upon phone order directly to the audience’s home on a cargo bike, in order to collect imaginative cityscapes through description, sounds and forms. These individual perspectives were processed into videos and presented in public space in a pop-up city model made of pizza boxes as part of the Premierentage Innsbruck. The mobile installation places the diverse voices of the city in spatial dialogue with each other, in order to discursively understand the identity of Innsbruck and to negotiate together.

See more in here

What inspires you as an artist? Walking, making music, doing chores, watching people, detritus and noise

What do you think is the purpose of art? Bringing people together, moving/touching them and give impulses for thought that can go beyond rational thinking

Your favourite book(s): Notebook of A. By Lucian Moriyama

Your favourite film(s): HyperNormalisation by Adam Kurtis

 

Contact information

Email: [email protected]

www.peterlorenz.at