Phantom Kino Ballett

Phantom Kino Ballett is a multidisciplinary performance by Lena Willikens and Sarah Szczesny.

Club elements like strobe lights, electronic music and smoke machines are combined with quotations from movie scenes, interview extracts, and spoken word in an audiovisual collage. An experimental music video serves as a medial extension of the cinema experience.

The project’s processual character develops through the interaction of costumes, sculptural interpretations of the stage, and a specific musical mix.

Willikens’ transportive DJ sets and music productions have instituted her as an in-demand and in-command dance music presence worldwide. For her acclaimed Phantom Delia release on Cómeme, minimal-wave tinged techno chug was paired with five video chapters created by Szczesny together with Willikens, a precursory tale to the Phantom Kino Ballett chronicle.

Szczesny studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dusseldorf under Rosmarie Trockel. Between 2011 and 2014 she has designed all the artwork for the Cómeme label. Her work investigates the materiality of media and the history and production of commercial visual culture. Appropriating and reassembling figments of popular, mechanically produced art and culture (both imagistic and textual) inform Szczesny’s contribution to the visual content of Phantom Kino Ballett as well as her musical contributions.

The current version has been developed during a three month residency of the artists at Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto, Japan, and will also be performed in the course of a tour in Montréal, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

From Goethe-Institut- New York