Mozart_Requiem: Selig sind die Toten

In the organizer's words:

Dance world premiere by Antonio Ruz with compositions by W.A. Mozart and Heinrich Schütz and sound design by Randomhype

The Requiem is Mozart's most mysterious work, commissioned by an ominous gray messenger - who later turns out to be a servant of Count Franz von Walsegg, who cultivated a strange hobby and commissioned works from well-known composers in order to perform them later as his own. While composing, Mozart senses that he is composing his own requiem mass and dies while working on the unfinished work - while still on his deathbed, he gives instructions on how the work should be completed.

Mozart's Requiem evokes with great expressiveness the emotional moments and abysses of human existence in the face of death - it describes a scene of borderline states, a waiting room and a place of passage to another world. This place may not be a place of longing, but Mozart poses musical questions about life, about humanity, about the tenderness and fragility of love and relationships and about the fragility of societies. His music reveals itself as an appeal to life. Choreographer Antonio Ruz responds to this and encourages us in his choreography to engage with death while we are still alive, to look it in the eye in order to be able to accept life. Antonio Ruz himself experienced the loss of a loved one last year and describes in his choreography the infinite number of emotions that can be associated with the death of a person: Gestures, looks, hugs, as well as the feelings of fear and empathy, loneliness and rejection, emptiness, anger and pain. How can all this be translated into choreography, into movement?

"We have to face death in order to embrace life. Dance is a powerful means of communication that overcomes cultural, ethnic, religious and political barriers and opens up a spiritual dimension."

Antonio Ruz