"My dance is an empirical way. 

I have worked from flamenco, Body Weather dance and free improvisation, on how to create sound, emotions and rhythms. The shoes are my instrument, and it doesn't end in the eyes or in the hands, but it goes beyond the body to be the space itself. Wood, wall, stone, people, chairs

My dance is about being in this moment, music, space, body and mind free, to compose in the instant an unrepeatable piece. 

I like the idea of thinking of sound as movements."

( Sònia Sánchez)

"To me, the word tradition represents at its best rituals to strengthen the community and the individual, evoke memories and draw on the insights and legacy of the past.

However, when traditional guidelines become dogma and form a rigid cosset that does not allow for further development and reinterpretation, traditions can easily become shackles and weaken inspiration and the artistic spirit."

(Judith Schwarz)

"For me, tradition is synonymous with something that provides stability an is solid as a rock. This has become increasingly clear to me, especially as a result of the many social crises in recent years. There are certain actions, rituals, dishes and festivals that keep repeating and allow us to feel the family, cultural and social roots regularly and weld us together. For me, dealing with traditions means dealing with stories, cultures and social developments that do not remain rigid in the past, but constantly develop over the course of time. So I feel it is a very important part of my work as an artist to treat traditions with great respect, to question them and reflect them and to pass them on to the next generation. For me, tradition is like a plasticine figure that retains its basic features, but is further deformed depending on the impact of other cultures or people."

(Lisa Hofmaninger)

"In this piece we discuss the meaning of tradition and cultural heritage. The sound as well as the performance of the musicians in the video show that tradition isn’t some past we try to carry into the future, but some kind of energy the recreates itself everytime it is dealt with. Tradition can adapt in face and sound while keeping it’s original soul and meaning in sound and in vision."

(Johannes Kerschbaummayr)

Since our cooperation partners  Sònia Sánchez (dance) and Pablo Rega (guitar/effects) repeatedly incorporate elements of the Spanish tradition into their artistic work and know how to celebrate them musically and performatively in a free context, we have as a source of inspiration for our joint work Project the quote:

"Tradition is the passing on of fire and not the worship of ashes."

With this mental starting point, Sonia and Pablo entered an artist residency in the theater in Barcelona and in an intensive working phase, in the course of improvisations, they collected vocabulary for our joint composition. As a result, they sent us a great video including audio, which left plenty of room for us as a duo to experiment and comment, to contribute our thoughts both musically and cinematically.

After a delayed period of exploring Spanish music as a duo (traditional and modern approaches to a certain extent) and analyzing the same meticulously recorded material, we extracted succinct elements and incorporated them into our musical language. This process was very inspiring and educational. The sources of inspiration were very different: the rhythms and sounds from the shoes of the flamenco dancers, the general accentuation of the rhythmic phrases, the structures and scales of traditional Spanish songs, as well as the timbre of the performers.

Our next step was to carefully enrich the existing recordings with building blocks from this large collection of ideas and gradually to form a piece from them. Together with our recording engineer and sound designer Arthur Fussy, we then recorded the appropriate elements and embedded them with the help of sensitive mixing.

Finally, we turned to the video material. We were very lucky with the source video of Sonia and her expressive movements of the shoes. This attitude, together with the sound, created very strong scenes right from the start and told an independent story. So we also kept these sequences as a guide throughout the video.

With short breaks and quick cuts, we set lightning-like impulses with material that was recorded with Johannes Kerschbaummayer, our visual artist, which refers to the music in order to tell further stories in which the other musicians also have space. We perceive these as abstract "memories" of the past, which often go hand in hand with traditions.