CONCEPT

How it works

There is no stage and no seating. Five musicians play on platforms spread across the space, surrounded by projections of compost seen through a microscope. The audience moves freely among them.

At the beginning, a voice introduces the game. Cards at the stations then explain what you can do. When a new phase of the game begins, a signal announces it and new cards become available. You decide how far you want to go: you can watch and listen, or join in and change what happens.

The stations

The soil table. On a floating table lies real soil. You can shape it, heap it up, spread it out. A sensor above the table recognises the forms you create and changes the music and the images in the room. Contact microphones make the sound of the soil audible as you stroke or scatter it. Sometimes a musician answers with gestures and sounds, and the table becomes an instrument.

The dance floor. A marked area on the floor counts the people standing on it. The more people step onto it, the fuller and denser the music becomes. In this phase the musicians come down from their platforms and dance with the audience.

Words for soil. What does soil mean to you? Write a word on a slip of paper and hand it in. The singers weave the words into their songs, and you may hear your own word a few moments later.

The listening station. Headphones hang above a heap of soil. Put them on and you hear what is otherwise hidden: sounds recorded inside the soil.

Real soil

Everything in Subtera starts from real soil. The earth on the table, the sounds and the microscopic images all come from the Holistic Compost Lab in St. Peter in the Black Forest, a place where soil is rebuilt through compost.