above: Video documentation of Monika Weiss’ Orgé (2024). Recorded on September 14, 2024. Courtesy Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum, Missouri Botanical Garden.

Orgé II

2024

Performative installation: live vocal music and movement performance

Duration: 20 minutes

CREDITS

Music composed/written by Monika Weiss

Movement choreography by Monika Weiss

Vocalists: Kelly Beckman, Katie Beyers, Ingrid Piazza, Rachel Jones, Heather Kays, Dean Moran, Alex Weckiewicz, Bei Qi, Brea Youngblood

Movement performers: Eva Aguero, Jungsoo Kim, Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón, Tess Losada-Tindall, Erin McLaughlin, Susan Pasek

Originally inspired by the invasion of Ukraine, Orgé is dedicated to all victims of wars, invasions, and colonial occupations. Conceived as a site-specific choral and movement environment, the piece resembles a forest of voices. The 2024 edition of Orgé (Orgé II) is organized at Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum, Missouri Botanical Garden, in collaboration with Laumeier Sculpture Park. Orgé II is curated jointly by Nezka Pfeifer (museum curator, Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum) and Dana Turkovic (curator, Laumeier Sculpture Park). The premiere of Orgé (Orgé I) took place in 2022 at Furlong Gallery, University of Wisconsin at Stout, Menomonie, Wisconsin, curated by Izabela Gola and Robert Atwell, in collaboration with Jerry (Chiwei) Hui as part of To Freedom program.

above: Museum Curator Nezka Pfeifer in Conversation with Artist and Composer Monika Weiss

Artist Statement

Orgé is an ancient Greek word which means “wrath”. It comes from the verb orago meaning, “to teem, to swell” and thus implies not a sudden outburst, but rather a permanent, established, and passionate feeling, solidifying what the beholder considers wrong. In my art, the musical and choreographed Lament connotes power and resistance through silence, sound and movement. Orgé is conceived as a site-specific choral and sculptural environment resembling a forest of voices.

I have divided the vocalists into those who murmur standing, resembling Trees, interspersed throughout the space, and those who are Wonderers, moving through space very slowly while singing composed phrases. Vocalists include untrained and trained musicians. Audience members can stand or seat around, on the periphery of this vocal field, or may walk through the vocal field in order to experience being on the inside of Orgé. Walking themselves, slowly, through the chorus of tree-like standing figures of vocalists, following the Wanderers, the audience members experience the stillness and thickness of the sustained choral sound. Orgé is performed as a protest against the speciific war, but also any war. It is also meant as an expression of sonic and ethical beauty, aiming symbolically towards a possibility of freedom. As an artist I believe that the sonic, embodied gesture of lamentation is potentially a revolutionary act that embraces emancipation as a vision of the future, in which history can no longer erase memory, just as the lost and raped lives of the people of Ukraine will never surrender to erasure from public memory.

- Monika Weiss

Essay Excerpt

The power of Weiss’ artistic message channels ancient performative vocal tradition of lament—as well as her live-long relationship to, and practice of, music (the artist was first educated as a pianist and classical musician)—transforms the viewer’s experience of time and space into a new sonic and visual landscape. With the participating vocalists and movement performers contribution to the act, like in Weiss’ Orgé, 2022, the piece becomes a collective body.

Through this intersection of the personal and the public in Orgé, a forest of performative bodies, created a spiritual body in an articulated, humanistic act of protest against war and violence […] There is a specific sonic stillness between acts, to which audience members as well as performers should pay special attention to, an interim space of dense sonic textures that focus listening attention inward and transform the participants from intimate individual bodily experience to an articulated collective conscious presence, a collective body. Monika Weiss’ Orgé is conceived as site-specific vocal music and as choreography of stillness. Every time it will be performed it will transform, depending on the physical surroundings and the number of participating vocalists.

- Izabela Gola, Monika Weiss’ Lament as an Act of Protest, Polish Cultural Institute New York, 2023 (to read full text click here)