Efa Hoffmann and Meltem Nil met at a workshop in November 2018. Since then they have improvised together and started to perform as a duo in January 2020.
Efa´s background is classical music, with the strong desire now to use her skills to go beyond genres and conventional concert
situations. She improvises on the piano and with her voice. Her style is a very creative mixture of melodies in the tonal and atonal system with percussive elements as well. Her voice generates a strong additional colour.
Efa´s background is classical music, with the strong desire now to use her skills to go beyond genres and conventional concert
situations. She improvises on the piano and with her voice. Her style is a very creative mixture of melodies in the tonal and atonal system with percussive elements as well. Her voice generates a strong additional colour.
Photos: Marcel Mayr & Tivadar Nemesi
Meltem has been improvising for over ten years as a soloist, also in duo and trio formats. Since two years she has been very interested in cooperating with musicians. Her main skill is to combine dance, gesture, voice, song, words and text as equal levels of elements to create a dynamic "tableau" .
With Efa´s music she finds an additional layer to mingle with. Her approach to Efa´s music can be heard as an intervention through strong voice contrasts or as harmonic and lucid layers on the music. But also the subtle changes between harmonizing musically and slight dis-harmonic shifts in the music are a thrilling field of research for Efa and Meltem.
Through movement and gesture Meltem creates scenes and sees herself in the "film" setting of the music. For Meltem space is not only the stage location, but also the space that the music creates. This is where the imaginative energy comes from.
Efa´s music creates space in which the moving performer generates her own emotional story. The movements can be
beyond every day movements as they are "abstract", at the same time gestures are parts of the movements, too. They make
characters appear. And gestures themselves trigger emotional situations in dialogue with the music.
Their duo is also an encounter of two different worlds. So the solo elements in their duo are a reference to the parallelism in existence and the random of encounter.
The texts they both create add another layer of space , the reflection space. The improvised texts are absurd and still very true as through word play a new kind of logic connected to our everyday lives appear. Then Meltem´s movement and gesture language adds to the very true absurd: the very true, musical and emotional, exciting and existential and touching absurd.
With Efa´s music she finds an additional layer to mingle with. Her approach to Efa´s music can be heard as an intervention through strong voice contrasts or as harmonic and lucid layers on the music. But also the subtle changes between harmonizing musically and slight dis-harmonic shifts in the music are a thrilling field of research for Efa and Meltem.
Through movement and gesture Meltem creates scenes and sees herself in the "film" setting of the music. For Meltem space is not only the stage location, but also the space that the music creates. This is where the imaginative energy comes from.
Efa´s music creates space in which the moving performer generates her own emotional story. The movements can be
beyond every day movements as they are "abstract", at the same time gestures are parts of the movements, too. They make
characters appear. And gestures themselves trigger emotional situations in dialogue with the music.
Their duo is also an encounter of two different worlds. So the solo elements in their duo are a reference to the parallelism in existence and the random of encounter.
The texts they both create add another layer of space , the reflection space. The improvised texts are absurd and still very true as through word play a new kind of logic connected to our everyday lives appear. Then Meltem´s movement and gesture language adds to the very true absurd: the very true, musical and emotional, exciting and existential and touching absurd.
