Songs of Life and Death

a musical homage to the poet Anne Sexton

Songs of Life and Death is a musical and visual rollercoaster through the short life of the American poet Anne Sexton, a haunting mixture of concert, reading and live-projection.

Michael Kolberg (e-guitars, sounds and effects) and Anna Stern (voice and vocals, live-projection) turn her lyrics into songs with hypnotic undertow.

Guitar grooves alternate with floating sounds and looped cascades of noise, the voice talks, mumbles, sings, conjures, flirts, dies away and revives again.

The two musicians/performers act against a moving background and are at once part of the „picture“: The aquarium on the stage is being applied performatively and filled with material associations to the lyrics. The rising, floating and sinking objects are projected onto a fragmented rear screen. The shift of dimension in the live-projection gives both objects and texts a new and alienated semantic level. The performance has been developed in 2012 and was shown in different locations, e.g. at the Theater im Pumpenhaus in Münster. The work earned an enthusiastic review.