Instagram - Bandcamp - Avantgardeners
BOOKING: booking@liviarita.com /+44 7549 245499 / +41 77 259 78 48
DATES FOR BOOKING: summer 2023 - summer 2024
DURATION: 60 minutes
DYSTOPIA WETLANDS is a new interdisciplinary performance by Livia Rita & the Avantgardeners based on the ethereal bio punk EP with the same name. The EP will be released in May 2023 alongside a cli-fi music video trilogy. DYSTOPIA WETLANDS explores cross-species alliances; interweaving our identities with nature and creating a future-focused complicity where nature can rebel.
Livia Rita has been tirelessly cultivating a reputation for subverting music through their tantalising and transformative live performances, merging musicianship and brave choreography with self-sculpted wearables (ArtFashion). This collaborative approach serves to explore the oscillating relationship of gender and nature as we strive for inclusion. During the DYSTOPIA WETLANDS live performance, the audience is invited to immerse themselves within a multisensory fantasy landscape, which provokes collective healing and intimate dreaming together with the natural world. The live band transforms into mossy creatures and lets their musical instruments be more and more taken over by samples and algorithms of natural environments, whilst the dancers metamorphosize into radical creatures, uniting the earthy with their imagination and inviting you on a quest to manifest and test possibilities of ambitious future cross-species identities.
Find below the different performance aspects:
The music is performed live by a band of 2 - 4 musicians (scalable) and combines digital sounds with a range of analog instruments.
Mystic Eco-Pop wants to enchant and bewitch, offering a new style of sensual, intuitive pop music from the occult world that casts spells upon the future. In DYSTOPIA WETLANDS, sirenesque melodies combine with analog synthesisers, crunchy beats and recordings of reality from the natural environments to create a misty, eclectic genre-defying sonic landscape, where danceable rhythms meet fragile, sensual melodies in gut-wrenchingly emotional ways.
ArtFashion are wearable visual art pieces that transform humans into mystical creatures through glitchy textures, manipulated body silhouettes and prosthetics. These ArtFashion pieces, when worn by performers, incite movement that creates an illusion of an otherworldly living being.
Performances of DYSTOPIA WETLANDS usually consist of 3 dancers and a diversity of ArtFashion pieces, but configurations are adaptable and flexible depending on the size of the space.
Inspired by the likes of the mask technique from Commedia dell’Arte, the dance practise, integrated with ArtFashion, serves the aim of bringing the creatures to life. The movement is rooted in instinct, listening and sensitivity, and devised to be easily accessible for all sorts of movers, giving equal weight to individuality as well as connectivity.
The collaborative development process of DYSTOPIA WETLANDS is taking place from December to March in a remote alpine location, surrounded by radical nature. Formerly a mountain guest house, the building provides the necessary residential space for artists to collaborate more deeply when bringing DYSTOPIA WETLANDS to life. There will be studio space for composition, sewing, fabrication, writing and rehearsing; giving DYSTOPIA WETLANDS an organic space to grow and allowing a full exchange and mutual inspiration.
Alongside the atelier, a pop-up cafe on the terrace will invite people who are ascending the mountain for hiking or skiing to witness the process, allowing for an exchange between artists and locals.
The cli-fi (climate fiction) short film and music video trilogy (13 minutes) is an exploration of the same themes and will be available for screenings as well as streaming online, and of course ideal to use for promotion of the performance. The music and video also allows people to interact with the work before and after the live show and create further meaningful bonds to the work’s ambitions in their private time.
Screenshots from the DYSTOPIA WETLANDS short film
Livia Rita is alpine witch and an emerging avant-pop artist, choreographer, designer, based somewhere/everywhere/nowhere between London, Zurich and the alps. Livia Rita’s debut album FUGA FUTURA was released on 7th October and is a collection of 11 songs that combine to create a world of dark fantasy, queer mythology and hope. Through speculative world building, singing an alternative realm into being, they gave birth to the in-between eco-system FUTURA, a space of endless possibilities as well as home to all the creatures. Though the exploration of anxiety, desire, identity, ecology, love and community, Livia Rita wants to awaken the otherworldly within; claiming the future as a space for our utopian dreams to thrive at the edge of existence. At the heart of her work is a desire to infiltrate your eyes, ears and mind with new ideas, conveying a sense of urgency.
DYSTOPIA WETLANDS builds upon the world FUTURA and continues to grow the creature community.
Below: songs of FUGA FUTURA
As collective fears of an uncertain future intensified, we saw our relationship to community and intimacy permanently altered. In response, we choose to stand closer together to overcome the challenges of our time, developing a life-affirming togetherness in the face of an unstable world. To this end, the Avantgardeners wishes to explore community building through creative projects; they wish to create an open, constantly transforming community of artists, creatives and activists. Our swampy garden plants the seeds to imagine and manifest future identities and worlds – a space for creation and possibilities to emerge. As eco-feminists immersed in LGBTQ+ and climate strike communities, we believe in a world outside of gender binaries and physical conformity. We believe in nurturing and celebrating intimate encounters with our precious ecosystem.
The Avantgardeners sprouted from the varied collaborative efforts connected to the work of Livia Rita, while steadily becoming its own ecosystem; our collaborative approach enables us to layer fresh perspectives.
Additionally, the Avantgardeners are building an archive of dreams, fears and desires as a means of shifting into this next epoch with care.
A SPACE FOR CROSS-POLLINATION
Our creative roots stretch across boundaries, creating a fertile garden for discussion, creation and possibility to emerge. The future is a collective term - it cannot be faced alone.
A COMMUNITY GARDEN FOR NATURE’S FUTURAS & ALL FELLOW CREATURES
Our generation’s tears fall freely in our garden. We reject the modern world’s destruction of potential in the name of pure progress and growth. Our work is future-focused: we explore queer utopias, environmental dystopias and everything in between. We seek to inspire a youth-led vision of change by daring to dream and refusing to conform. We uphold nature as our guide and core as we grasp for a new, tangible futures together. We turn observers and critics into active participants in the act of world-building.
Avantgardeners Productions
From concerts to workshops, performances, exhibitions and films, Avantgardeners Productions is responsible for making abstract dreams more tangible.
Avantgardeners Community
We are a borderless growing web open for anyone who wants to interact with us. We are elevating each other over rivalry / competition.
Avantgardeners Studio
The studio is the making-atelier of the Avantgardeners, to be based at Bündner Rigi during winter 2023. Creatives share their skills to make objects for projects and productions. Interdisciplinary dialogue sparks new adventures in making alongside others who share a similar vision.
Gang of witches
We are a network of people working in dance familiar with the ArtFashion-movement practise. We always reformat locally for shows to avoid pollution and far travels. The advantage of the movement practise around creatures is that it is easy accessible.
TEAM OF DYSTOPIA WETLANDS
To be announced shortly
DYSTOPIA WETLANDS is scalable and responsive to spaces (f.ex creating an immersive set-up where the space allows). We appreciate having some time in the space beforehand to work with the environment as much as possible.
In terms of the live music, we need a good PA & mixer, as well as a sound engineer.
In terms of light, we are flexible to adapt to local possibilities, but will send through an ‘ideal’ light design and appreciate working with a local light engineer. We will use haze.
We need table to sell merch after the show
If we decide to do a screening of the film, we need a projector and a screen.
Information about costs will be discussed in the emails directly.
We travel by train, boat and touring van.
TRAVELLING & PERFORMING CREW
Our ideal crew consists of 2 - 4 musicians (band in small or bigger formation) with an original live arrangement, three dancers (2 locals) (also scalable to 1 dancer) and a producer managing our Swampy Coven / merch stand (more info below) and supporting our social media.
Where the space allows / invites to - especially in immersive set-ups - we like working with additional performers to have further creatures taking over the space towards the end of the show.
Mini-FORMATION
2 musicians, 1 dancerCasual FORMATION
3 musicians, 2 dancers, 1 producerMore all-encompassing immersive FORMATION for bigger spaces
4 musicians, 3 dancers, further local creatures, 1 choreography support, 1 producer
For the additional creatures, we work with professionals where budgets allow, or with amateurs or beginners where we don’t have enough budget, but feel excited that the creatures will have a big impact in the space. Then, we just offer transport costs (and ideally some food).
We developed an alternative, interactive merch stand, where people can meet the FUTURA world on a multisensory level; from smells custom made by our herbalist, a physical spell books combining the lyrics with photography, VR glasses to the world of FUTURA to gamey tarot cards of the creatures they will meet onstage. Audiences are invited to grow into a temporary community, joining for small rituals to propagate their superpowers and stepping through the gateway between this world and the next.
Below; examples of the creature game cards for FUGA FUTURA
Below: FUGA FUTURA @ Zentralwäscherei 2022, pics by Chico Heubeck & @venuscyborg
Below: FUGA FUTURA on UK tour 2022
Below: A bigger shows with more creatures @ Colour Factory London
Below: A video from our performance @Colour Factory in London.
We had the space for one day only, and worked with local creatures (mainly amateurs) to create a creature transition into a party. We transformed the performance space into a club towards the end of the show.
Below: Video from our performance @Zentralwäscherei.
We collaborated with local creatures to transform the performance space into a club towards the end of the show.
