coal mine birds

From the series SOIRÉE DANSANTE

World premiere: October 16, 2025
Shows: October 17 + 18
Odeon Theater
8 pm
Duration: 60 min

In collaboration with PHACE
Music by Simon Steen Andersen, Alessandro Baticci, Andreas Berger, Jérôme Combier, François Sarhan, and Agata Zubel.

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In the 19th century, canaries were taken into coal mines to warn of invisible danger. Their silence meant life was at risk: if a bird collapsed in its cage, it signaled the miners to flee. From this practice came the metaphor “canary in the coal mine” – the early messenger, the one who senses danger before others are aware of it.

This is the image that inspires Liquid Loft & PHACE, the contemporary music ensemble, in their continuation of the Soirée Dansante series at Vienna’s Odeon. Their new project, coal mine birds, is dedicated to those who perceive the uncertainties and threats of the future more keenly than most – artists, for example, who create today as seismographs of the social, political, and ecological upheavals still ahead. In ancient Greece, even Pythia, the oracle of Delphi, let herself be carried into trance by gases rising from the earth before giving her prophecies.

Beyond familiar models of opera, coal mine birds (a postscript to the ImPulsTanz Festival) presents itself as music theater: a choreography for ten performers and five musicians, reimagining ballroom encounters in strange, fragmented ways, with the audience entering a stage-within-the-stage, drawn directly into the surrounding scene. Six contemporary works are performed live – by Simon Steen Andersen, Alessandro Baticci, Jérôme Combier, François Sarhan, Agata Zubel and Andreas Berger – music that reinterprets the past to cast forward into the future. It becomes an installative dance evening, a ghostly variation on the ball, where gestures against loneliness are staged, pushing toward intensity, ecstasy, dissolution. Bodies and objects become hybrids, forming unexpectedly only to fall apart again – like a thought flashing across synapses, like a fleeting memory, like a utopia too fragile to last.

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The writer Kurt Vonnegut once asked what the use of the arts might be. His most hopeful thought was what he called the “canary-in-the-coal-mine theory”: that artists are vital because they are hypersensitive. They react to danger long before others are able to notice – though in doing so, they sometimes suffer themselves. The Russian collective Chto Delat, founded in St. Petersburg in 2003, took up the metaphor again in their Canary Archives (2022), a pacifist response to the war against Ukraine. To point out danger is to risk one’s own survival. Respect, then, to the unflinching ones – the voices, the feelers, the coal mine birds – who, through their fragile songs, open our eyes.

Stefan Grissemann

Reinhard Fuchs, artistic director PHACE, about the production: Coal mine birds is a feverish journey into darkness, where sound, bodies, and objects blend into unstable hybrids: Dido’s Lamento sinks chromatically downward, breaking apart into glissandi, pizzicati, and bottleneck cries. Memories flare like strobes, light becomes both narcotic and intoxication – a club, a grave, a stage of shadows. Voices, bodies, samples, bursts of rock, piano crashes, field recordings: everything shatters, everything starts again. A tribute, a distortion, a transformation – wild, sarcastic, intimate. Music theater as a burning mine, as a frozen glacier, as a lament tearing itself apart.

With the kind support of IMPULSTANZ.