"Minimalist black and white"

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Artistic success for HfMT PhD student

Despite the coronavirus crisis, 2021 looks set to be an extremely successful year for Chinese-born composer Yiran Zhao. The doctoral student from Prof. Gordon Kampe's composition class can look forward to a "double".

This currently includes winning a production prize at "NoOperas", an internationally renowned project in which three theaters form an association for three seasons each. The theaters alternate between first and follow-up productions. The feXm, supported by NRW KULTURsekretariat and Kunststiftung NRW, provides its own dramaturgical supervision, organizational support and public relations work and thus acts both as a funding institution and as a co-producer of the theaters participating in the association.

Furthermore, Yiran Zhao's first portrait CD, which she produced with Ensemble Recherche, will be released this year on the WERGO label.

Artistic CV
The composer-performer Yiran Zhao magnifies and amplifies acoustic nuances, subtle movement structures and small physical gestures with media means in order to make them perceptible in the first place.
Minimalist black and white - a common denominator of Yiran Zhao's music and performance works: This aesthetic categorization refers to the visuality that is characteristic of Zhao's work, when her music reaches out into the medial, physical and gestural.
However, it also describes the sonic dimensions, as her compositions are often focused on reduced (sound) material, structurally transparent and quiet - in other words, anything but poppy, colourful and intrusive.
She also performs on stage herself and in this way turns her own body into compositional material, fragmenting and microscoping it using contact microphones or close-up video recordings.
Body parts such as eyelashes, heads or hands are simultaneously abstracted through audiovisual magnification, as their contours and forms are worked out through projections, light and shadow: Zhao's movement scores then appear schematic and formalistic, but without giving up the physical presence and sensuality of the performers.

If you want to find out more about the artist, Deutschlandfunk Kultur has produced a one-hour portrait [Link](https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/die-composer-performerin-yiran-zhao-minimalistisches.3819.de.html?dram:article_id=483203) of Yiran Zhao.