Studio Percussion Graz

STUDIO PERCUSSION GRAZ

Interests: music, percussion, contemporary art

Founded in 1979 by Günter MEINHART, over the past 30 years STUDIO PERCUSSION graz has conjured up an impressive number and variety of productions on all kinds of stages, both at home and abroad. Exciting projects in the contemporary field, exploratory collaborations with musicians, composers and event organisers in the fields of jazz and classical music, special programmes for children and young people and a passion to create their own musical theatre productions, have consistently characterised the work by STUDIO PERCUSSION graz.

Günter Meinhart was born in Graz and there he studied percussion instruments at the University of Music and Performing Arts, where he has worked as a contract teacher since 1995. Meinhart runs workshops and seminars at home and abroad and stages numerous events with his group STUDIO PERCUSSION graz.

“My own personal, artistic work has been focussed for almost 30 years on my ensemble STUDIO PERCUSSION graz and I consider myself fortunate to be able to work regularly with this group and its contributing musicians, video artists, technicians and other creative people. For me, STUDIO PERCUSSION graz is a gigantic paintbrush that offers me the possibility to paint what are sometimes exquisitely beautiful, sometimes brusque, often interesting, yet also cheerful acoustic pictures and leave them behind in spaces. For me that is a divine gift.”

Günter Meinhart

Journey through sound

A JOURNEY THROUGH SOUND, BEAUTIFUL AND FURIOUS

FACES AND PLACES is a very strong-willed project animated above all by musical brilliance. In the FACES AND PLACES production, 14 musicians from 5 nations recount the personal histories of four musicians from Burkina Faso, Venezuela, Syria and Cuba who, coming from various situations and following a variety of paths, have ended up in the musical country of Austria and here perform a juggling act with survival and art. In their crossover-project embodying music, performance, film and theatre, people from , Syria, Burkina Faso, Cuba, Austria and Venezuela present their art and their lives, illustrate their paths to and through Austria, the tightrope.

An intimate and, at the same time, colourful stage show that was developed out of biographical documentary material. Personal histories, video projection, sound and image sculptures blend with the music to form an intoxicating musical and theatrical performance which, on the one hand, presents personalities and, on the other, puts into sharp focus the happenstances and cooperation arising from global humankind. The fact that so much trans-cultural fusion ultimately results in the breaching of the stage and auditorium is of course intentional.

Read more for this amazing project: FACES & PLACES_Mappe 2016_engl