A MULTIMEDIA JOURNEY

UR! is an ambitious total concept to stage, expand and explore Kurt Schwitters’ 1932 sound poem Ursonate, blending live performance, video, and electronics into a surreal, multimedia journey. Center stage is vocalist Michael Schmid – renowned for his decade-long study and 100+ performances of the Ursonate – taking on the roles of stand-up- performer, toastmaster, and “psycho-analyzee”, alongside Schwitters himself.

URSONATE

Together with composer and stage director Simon Steen-Andersen, he dives headfirst into the Schwitters rabbit-hole, seizing the core concepts of the Ursonate – the first great phonetic poem of the Dadaist era. The German prefix UR refers to the idea of primitivism and primordial sound. Abstraction, repetition, and the collapse of meaning and disciplines – and spins them into a fever-dreamish mix of biography, history, media fragments, subconscious memory, pop culture, and not least the inevitable failures of Large Language Models when confronted with Dada.

THE NEW LOGIC

The notion of “ur” as a primordial or originating essence lingers, but in an age shaped by artificial intelligence, it also takes on a meaning hinting at the dawn of new logics yet to be named. The performer becomes an avatar of Schwitters himself – or a post-Schwitters persona: a speculative figure speaking in an alien tongue that strangely resembles our own. In the spirit of Kurt Schwitters, UR! will perform a radical balance-act between meaning and sound, language and music, stage and film, fact and fiction, reality and dream.