Koen de Wit and myself started experimenting with poetry against clarinet improvisation in the late ninetees. The Mayakovsky performances were a return to those roots, this time expanded with a laptop running custom software for visuals and realtime audio manipulation.
I recite a poem by Mayakovsky in Dutch to Koen de Wit playing clarinet. The laptop running max/msp feeds us back the performance, cut-up, reversed, scrambled nonsense, slowly fading to a recording of Mayakovsky reciting the same poem in Russian almost a century ago. While we perform a stop motion sequence by Sabine Bolk is synched using jitter software.
Our first performance of ‘Mayakovsky’ was at the 80th proeflokaal in Theater Kikker in Utrecht.The second performance was recorded in Cafe Het Hijgend Hert, Breda.