CRIPPLED SYMMETRIES Festival - Patterns in Contemporary Music

Friday, 17. Apr 2026 – Sunday, 19. Apr 2026

at 7:00 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.

St. Elisabeth & Villa Elisabeth

A project by Ensemble KNM Berlin in collaboration with the Busan International Contemporary Music Festival, the Department of Musicology at Freie Universität Berlin, the Frequenz_Festival Kiel, the Goethe-Institut Lima, the Alternative Stage of the Greek National Opera, Kultur Büro Elisabeth, MaerzMusik / Berliner Festspiele, and Studio Acht Taipei.

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CRIPPLED SYMMETRIES by KNM Berlin: six concerts, three days, international perspectives.

CRIPPLED SYMMETRIES by KNM Berlin is both a concert series and a festival—an international forum where composers, performers, and collectives from diverse cultural contexts come together.

Taking Morton Feldman’s late work *Crippled Symmetry* as its starting point, the series focuses on repetition, variation, displacement, and re-examination. These elements appear here not as abstract principles, but as lived artistic practice—shaped by individual biographies, experiences, and perspectives.

Festival Program
Six concerts over three days—each with its own sonic signature.

In Re/Set, Petra Strahovnik explores her experiences with long COVID. Tristan Perich creates dense, pulsating structures from 1-bit sound. Bumki Kim, Eunseon Yu, Gyu Bong Yi, and Seil Oh draw on the shamanic gut tradition of the port city of Busan and transpose it into new contexts.

Ana Maria Rodriguez and Juan Felipe Waller explore cyclicality through the lens of upcycling. The RETAMA Women Composers Collective combines indigenous rituals with contemporary forms of expression. Zesses Seglias focuses on the gong as a multifaceted sound instrument.

The Trio Cube Band is given carte blanche with works by Kee Yong Chong, Ying Wang, Deqing Wen, and Chin-Hsien Chung

Concert program on Friday, April 17, 2026

5:30 PM, Villa Elisabeth
Live podcast with Cube Band

7:00 PM, Villa Elisabeth

Cube Band recital

To Vote or Be Voted For – Set 1

The young Taiwanese trio Cube Band will open the Crippled Symmetries Festival.

With their unique lineup, the three musicians combine the traditional Chinese string instruments pipa and guzheng with Western percussion. Between control and boundary-pushing, virtuosic soundscapes full of tension emerge.

8:30 PM, St. Elisabeth Church

AnA Maria Rodriguez/Juan Felipe Waller, Ensemble KNM Berlin

From Material to Time – Set 2

The artistic work of Ana María Rodríguez and Juan Felipe Waller conceives of recycling as an aesthetic process and explores the sonic and symbolic potentials of reused materials. Together with the Ensemble KNM, Zesses Seglias designs sonic circular forms in which memory, transience, and resonance converge.

Concert program on Saturday, April 18, 2026

5:30 PM Villa Elisabeth
Live Podcast with Gyu-Bong Yi, Seil Oh, Bumki Kim, and Eunseon Yu

7:00 PM, Villa Elisabeth

Ensemble KNM Berlin, Sol-I So, Bo-Sung Kim

Gut - Set 3

The South Korean port city of Busan is home to the shamanic dance culture “Gut,” which manifests itself in songs and dances accompanied by instrumental music. In collaboration with the Busan International Contemporary Music Festival, the third set presents works by Korean composers who reinterpret this local tradition from a contemporary perspective.

8:30 PM, St. Elisabeth Church

Ensemble 0

Open Symmetry - Set 4

The French Ensemble 0 presents music by Tristan Perich in Berlin for the first time with Open Symmetry. The New York-based artist, internationally known for his music and sound objects based on the smallest musical units, combines the aesthetic clarity of mathematics, physics, and code with a pulsating, living space. Repetition, rupture, and timbres are in constant motion here, bearing witness to Tristan Perich’s unique sonic language.

Concert program on Sunday, April 19, 2026

5:30 p.m. – Villa Elisabeth
Live Podcast with Retama

7:00 PM, St. Elisabeth Church

Ensemble KNM Berlin

Sound as a New Beginning - Set 5

Drawing on her own experience with long COVID, Petra Strahovnik has developed a composition that centers on breath, healing, and a new beginning. Inspired by modern trauma research as well as practices such as Yoga Nidra, Vipassana, and mantras, the work combines individual experience with collective wisdom. Through fragmented, shifting material, breathing phrasing, and ritual gestures, a meditative sound space emerges in which body and mind, past and present, converge.

8:30 PM, Villa Elisabeth

Ensemble KNM Berlin

Safe Spaces - Set 6

Retama is the first collective network of Peruvian women composers of contemporary music, founded in 2020 to increase the visibility of music by women and create safe spaces for interdisciplinary projects. Their program brings together four works that focus on cycles, rituals, and the connection between humanity, nature, and the cosmos. In doing so, the young composers draw upon the mythology and history of their homeland.

Performers:
Ensemble KNM Berlin (GER) – Cube Band (TWN) – Ensemble 0 (FRA)
Kee Yong Chong (MYS), Chin-Hsien Chung (TWN), Bumki Kim (KOR), Seil Oh (KOR), Tristan Perich (USA), RETAMA – Claudia Sofía Alvarez, Wendolyne Guerra Alvarez, Darlene Neyra Leon & Yemit Ledesma Portilla (PER), AnA Maria Rodriguez (ARG), Zesses Seglias (GRC), Petra Strahovnik (SVN), Juan Felipe Waller (MEX), Ying Wang (CHN/DEU), Deqing Wen (CHE/CHN), Eunseon Yu (KOR), Gyu-Bong Yi (KOR).

Tickets:
Single-day tickets €16 / €12 (reduced) plus advance booking fee, or 3-day festival ticket €36 / €30 (reduced) plus advance booking fee, available online via Eventim and at the box office.

Funding:
Supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. With the kind support of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.
Media partners: Jungle World, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, tipBerlin

Veranstaltungsart

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