John is seriously playful about understanding and presenting themselves. John is playfully serious about understanding and presenting themselves.
This is not a tautology. This is a state of being.
Bojana Mladenović – Theater maker and the artistic director of Hetweem theater, Amsterdam.
John the Houseband
“John the Houseband – Tripping North” is a Concert-Performance, searching
for traces of old and forgotten traditional Nordic Folksongs in our nowadays bodies and voices. As a collective of five choreographers/performers from the North, the Middle and the South of Europe, John the Houseband is a project, which follows its fascination in performing concerts and singing choreographies.
The Nordic Project will explore musical traditions, differences and similarities in Sweden and Iceland and how they can be transformed, mingled and transmitted through the bodies of two local and three foreign performers with a different cultural background.
The leading question is how six bodies and voices from four different countries can bring back a forgotten but in human development deeply rooted tradition of singing and dancing together. What is the vital core of these long existing songs? What do they tell us now about our today’s selves, once they are brought back to presence?
The result is an exciting form where music and dance is celebrated. John the Houseband finds inspiration in using each others differences. The differences in language, in musicality and in physicality enables them to move from extravagant disco to subtle acapella, from flamenco to r’ n’ b, from Iceland to Spain.
Performance hours:
Saturday 10th of September 22:00 – 23:00
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John the Houseband is a project born in Amsterdam in the Theatreschool from a group of dancers and choreographers from Sweden, Iceland, Belgium, Spain and Germany.
John the Houseband came together as a collaborative changing body, a band, which is not a band in normal terms, but an art project. A projection, a quest and investigation of LIFE: live music, practice, performance and different persons and identities. John is inspired by the particular ability of live music to affect an audience in a direct and very primal way.
What joins John strongly is the interest of combining live music on stage with the moving body and the ability of moving the audience. The interest for The Nordic Project developed already in his first two works, “John the Houseband at the Diva Body” (2008) and “John Houseband at Hetveem Theater” (2010).
John the Houseband consists of three mikrocorgs, two ukuleles, a spanish guitar, melodica and drums. John´s aim is to blur the boundaries between concert and performance, profession and amateurism, skills and dedication.
On individual levels, the members of John are working with dance companies such as Damaged Goods/Meg Stuart and Ultima Vez/Wim Vandekeybus, touring with the Aerowaves dance network and performing independently their own work with various artists all over Europe.
