Reconstruction rationale:
"On three consecutive nights at HAU2, a rich programme of performances and lectures will explore the life and legacy of choreographer, electronic music composer, improviser, dance therapist, and pedagogue Ernest Berk. Berk’s innovative, multifarious career spanned six decades and reflected deep involvement in leftist politics and devoted interest in non-Western aesthetics....
Berk opened a studio in Camden, London and began dedicating himself more seriously to the composition of electronic music and musique concrète, at first mainly for his own performances but then also for theatre, television, and film. His synthesis of musique concrète and movement made him one of the most visionary in a wave of pioneering electronic music composers.... It wasn’t until the 1980s that Berk would return to Germany – this time to Berlin, where he began teaching music therapy and improvisation at both the performing arts and music departments at the Arts university, Hochschule der Künste (now Universität der Künste)....
In “The Complete Expressionist”, the celebrated and versatile Berlin choreographer Christoph Winkler will oversee the long-overdue reconstruction of Ernest Berk’s dance pieces and the performance of selected musical compositions as live tape concerts.... Whereas some performances strive to provide accurate reconstructions of original pieces, others will reference the originals through performativity or feature new compositions that pay tribute to Berk through adherence to his texts about performance. The evening, which resembles programme cycles typical of the 1960s and 70s in its eclectic collaging of short works, includes solo dances, duets, and group pieces both pre-composed and improvised. A lifelong believer in and practitioner of nudism, in the 1970s Berk regularly hosted “trance dance sessions” at his studio in which he improvised repetitive electronic rhythms and dancers moved, naked, in repetitive gestures."
A couple of people associated with the PAN label - Rashad Becker and Pan Daijing - were involved in "The Complete Expressionist".
"These sessions will be reenacted via two pieces, and group A will provide the live soundtrack using samples of Berk’s original rhythmic patterns. In collaboration with Pan Daijing, Rashad Becker will use fragments from Berk’s original material but also present new material inspired by Berk’s working methods, musical structures, and textual instructions.
"A short BBC film clip about Berk, select video art pieces, and talks by British experimental musician Ian Helliwell and theatre and dance researcher Patrick Primavesi will round out the presentations. Listening stations featuring Berk’s numerous compositions will also be installed in the HAU2 foyer."
Damn would love to have heard the Berk tuneage on those listening stations!
Actually that's not quite true - two tunes appeared on the CD with Ian Helliwell's Tape Leaders book, "Chigger Sound 1" and "No Fish or Oh Mr Bard"
But the vast majority of his music, some 230 compositions, languish out of earshot.
But they still exist - safely kept if inaccessible to most everybody who'd be interested - in an archive in Cologne:
Content:
Berk, Ernest, 1909-1993, dancer, choreographer.
The estate of Ernest Berk:
The Historical Archive of the City of Cologne has been home to the artistic legacy of Ernest Berk since April 1994: audio tapes with accompanying works directories, a tape recorder, concert program, newspaper articles and letters. This hitherto neglected estate opens up the possibility of exploring another area of Berk's artistic activity, which has hitherto been predominantly known as a dancer and choreographer: the composition of electronic music in the field of tension between "musique concrète" and "modern dance" - two terms, Berk has often chosen as the motto of his performances.
The life of Ernest Berk:
Ernest Berk was born on October 12, 1909 in Cologne, from where he worked as a solo dancer and choreographer at various locations after training at the Cologne Wigman Institute (expressive dance) and at the Rheinische Musikschule (composition).
In 1934 Berk went to England with his wife Lotte. Here was his ambition to make new forms of dance public through a wide range of art. In 1955 he founded his own studio for electronic music in London. With his instruments, he created a complete work of about 230 tape compositions for ballet, expressive dance, film and television. In 1985, Berk followed a call to the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, where he expanded his activities through teaching, as an actor in the theater and in feature films. On September 30, 1993, Ernest Berk died in Berlin.
Find list by Martin Köhler
Contains:
correspondence, personal documents, production and teaching materials, audio tapes, photos
Notices: Closed until: 01.01.2024
Amount: 22 boxes, approx. 14.00 meters of tape
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Here's something I found online that may well be Berk's music - it's not identified as such - as the score to an "unrehearsed live performance with Peter Donebauer, Simon and dancer Ernest Berk" from the late Seventies..
In Earnest 1979 - clip from Peter Donebauer on Vimeo.
Then there's Berk's score to this short film by David Gladwell.
Public Information were supposed to reissuing some Berk music but they've gone awfully quiet recently - last release was 2016.
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