WINDY CITY

Hauke Berheide & Amy Stebbins

Tonhalle Düsseldorf, Premiered October 1, 2022

AS THE WIND PLAYS THE CITY...

by Amy Stebbins

The metallic plinking of radiators. The deep thrum of a thousands A/C units. The piercing howl of the tornado sirens. The Chicago soundscape testifies to the city's desire to control its climate. Even underground, you can hear the steamheat being blown into the city's homes as the cold wind rushes across the gridplan streets. The Montrose Bird Sanctuary provides shelter from this man-made noise. Yet... Even there, the cardinals and cicadas sing in hopes of changing winds.

That famous wind. Symbol of the city's unity and its inequality. It puffs up the sails of million-dollar yachts, it pushes car exhaust into the lungs of bicycle couriers or abruptly drives with its polar air into the green spring day. The wind. The great link of a city collapsing in contrasts. And when it dies down, when the heat rises, so does the violence. In Chicago, the first warm day of spring is both a party and a bloodbath: Memorial Day 2022 saw thirty-three victims in just one day....

"Windy City" is a love letter to America's Second City, written by two outsiders who once, and for a while, got to call Chicago home. It's also an experiment in the relationship between sound and image -- a relationship that has been engineered to death by the likes of Hans Zimmer and Netflix. That's what we're breaking free from. Influenced by the experimental documentaries of Dziga Vertov, Oskar Fischinger's "visual music" and Jacques Tati's playful defamiliarization of the spatial order between sound and image, we wanted to explore their interplay -- not just at the moment of reception, but in the very process of creation. The result is a heterogeneous pas de deux that attempts to convey the beauty and the repulsiveness, the luxury and the lack, the hot and the cold of life in the Windy City.