The Collaborators
David Barittoni – Assistant Director & Light Designer
David is an assistant director, light designer, vocal performer and composer. He designs and carries out lighting projects for the stage, for museums and art installations. He also composes and performs music for movie soundtracks, theatre, ballet and art installations.
He graduated in scenography and costume design at the European Institute of Design (IED) in Rome. He worked as assistant director to Marco Carniti, Cherif, Roberto Gandini, Sahlan Momo, Giancarlo Nanni and many others. The collaboration with Marco Carniti has been long and productive both as a composer and as a light designer (1996-2019).
Since 2007 he has worked for Fabio Sargentini’s Galleria Attico as a light designer and technical director for art exhibitions, live performances and art installations.
Among his accomplishments as a light designer he worked in the productions of Gaetano Donizetti’s Anna Bolena at the Teatro Bellini in Catania, Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata for the Shanghai Opera Week, both staged by Marco Carniti in 2015. He worked for the retrospective exhibition of Giancarlo Limoni Il giardino del Tempo at the MACRO Museum in Rome (2017), for the exhibition La luce diversa by Catania-Palmier-Sanna at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (2018).
As a vocal soloist he worked for the Center of music research TiConZero (1996); for Massimo Nunzi’s Big Band (2002) and for Antonio Jasevoli’s CD My own experience (2012).
In 2006 he inaugurated the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation with a live performance and, in the same year, he was a music consultant and a performer in the soundtrack of the movie Mary directed by Abel Ferrara. In 2009 he performed as a vocalist in the play Futurama by Giancarlo Cauteruccio and also with the Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble (PMCE) in the Opera Le streghe di Venezia by Philip Glass.
Among his achievements as a composer he has written music for the Ballet Company Altroteatro directed by Lucia Latour (1999-2009); in 2006 he wrote the soundtrack for the movie Sleeping Around directed by Marco Carniti for which he won the award for Best Original Soundtrack at The Ibiza International Film Festival. In 2012 he composed the score for the exhibition of Marika Carniti Bollea’s works Realismo Magico at the Complesso del Vittoriano in Rome. In 2014 he wrote the soundtrack for the short film La Bouillabaisse for which he won an award at the 48 Hour Film Project. In 2016 he composed the score for the permanent installation Il giardino Sonoro by Ghizzano and in 2018 for Help The Ocean by Maria Cristina Finucci at the Roman Forum.
June Wen – Aroma designer
June is a leading aromatherapist educator in the Chinese-speaking world and a sought-after expert on medicinal and aromatic plants and olfaction. She authored articles, handbooks and essays and was nominated forTaiwan’’s literary Golden Tripod Awards (2011). Her educational projects have ventured as well in such fields as music, theatre and calligraphy.
She collaborated with the Dutch film director David Verbeek for the production of Immortelle (2013) and An Impossibly Small Object (2018), both nominated at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Her many travels in the Mediterranean area led to a documentary film on the links between ancient Greek literature and aromatic plants.
In the course of the last twenty years, building on her knowledge of chemical components, therapeutic and medicinal effects and the socio-cultural histories of plants and their extracts from all over the world, she has created a series of aromatic blends for her own companyCanjune and her brand ANIUS. Besides the therapeutic applications as massage oils, she has applied her blends in other contexts, such as designing a set of aromas for artworks at the World Design Capital Taipei 2016exhibition, enhancing visitors’ visual experience with an olfactory one. Website
The Performers
Auditions to complete the cast will be held during 2019.
Ivan Vincenzo Cozzi
Photo: Mario Cinque
Ivan is an Italian actor, performer and director, for over fifty years active in the experimental theatre, focusing on the actor’s creative process and on the political function of theatre.
His professional training includes meetings and collaborations with the Living Theatre of Julian Beck and Judith Malina, street theatre workshops with Iben Nagel Rasmussen (Odin Teatret), acting workshops with Jerzy Grotowski, Dario Fo, Lindsay Kemp, and direction with Dominique De Fazio.
In the Seventies, he founds in Rome the cultural association Lanterna Rossa that, in 1988, he turns into The Way to the Indies company. In the Eighties, he is a Grant Muradoff’s student of Tai Chi Chuan martial art, a practice that he integrates with his theatrical experience and that he teaches as an essential component of the actor’s work. In the same period, as an international performer on stilts, he develops his own acrobatic performing technique.
In the Nineties, he is among the founding artists of the School of Mime at the Teatro dell’Opera of Rome; takes part in several productions of some of the main Italian lyric institutions — Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Arena di Verona, and Ente Lirico di Cagliari among others — and in national and international festivals, films and television shows. Pursuing his research on the different forms of the theatrical languages, he organizes “field” workshops in at the source of anthropological and popular theatre (Shantiniketan, Mc Leod Ganji, India).
In 1995 he founds in Rome, and directs ever since, the Argillateatri organisation, which produces shows, concerts, street theatre performances, workshops, activities for children and other cultural activities; inviting in its Permanent Laboratory for the Performing Arts, artists and teachers from different disciplines and where he himself trains artists, buskers and movement theatre performers.
He is the manager and Artistic Director of the buskers & performers festival Per le Antiche Strade (Carpineto Romano, Italy).
Among his main theatre directions and works: Herbarie. Le chiamavano streghe (2019), the love and struggle of medieval herbalists; Le acque delle camene (2018); Le città invisibili (2016), on I. Calvino’s novel; Viaggio alla montagna dell’anima (2012) dramatized and musical reading of Rumi, Krishnamurti and other texts of spiritual poets; Una cava poetica (2012), performance for World Poetry Day for Peace; Campagna e i segni dell’acqua: tradizione, devozione e sacralità (2010), multimedia project; Il labirinto (2010), from Ovid to Durrenmatt; Omaggio a Stravinskij (2009), score for stilts and dance, Centenary of Futurism Il Pugno di Boccioni; I fucanoli (2007), multimedia project; Il marinaio (2005), by F. Pessoa; Minotauro (2003), theatrical and music reading of F. Durrenmatt’s short story; Never failed me yet … (2003), theatrical performance; Cose usate (2003), from A. Wesker’s Yardsale; Angeli, vagabondi e demoni (2000), a medieval story; Turandot (1992), G. Puccini’s opera, Theatre Gyan Manch, Calcutta, India. Website Website
Gonca Gürses van Herpen
Gonca is a Turkish soprano and sound-healer born in Munich, Germany, and living in Eemnes, in The Netherlands. She holds a BA in English teaching as a second language, and a BM from the İstanbul Mimar Sinan State Conservatory for Performing Arts in Opera (MSÜ). She taught drama, dance, music, singing, Turkish Culture & Language in English, among others, at the International School, at the MSÜ Conservatory, and at the British Int. School.
Since 2002, she has been practising different healing techniques, Reiki, Healing with Gem Stones, Kwan Yin, Full Spectrum Healing, Ra-Sheeba, Medicine Wheel, Munay-Ki, Shambala, overtone singing, etc. In 2006, she studied the healing power of the human voice with the Sound Healing technique under Jonathan Goldman, Laraaji, and Sarah Benson in Boulder, Denver, US, mastering her sound healer certificate. After years of studies and research, she gathered her knowledge around her own method and is currently a member of the World Sound Healers Association.
In Turkey, she performed as a soloist, among others, at the Istanbul State Opera House as the Queen of the Night from The Magic Flute in Do you like Mozart?, Nina in the musical Nutcracker version for children, Lucy in Telephone; did vocal improvisation for the dance performance in the Transit-İstanbul Improvisation Days in Music & Dance, at Darphane-i Amire; participated in the İstanbul Biennial, in the 360 Degree Love Festival with the recital and sound healing session Therapy of Love, and was back-vocal for the album Yeni Şarkılar(New Songs) of the pianist Fazıl Say. In the Netherlands, she performed, in particular, at the Meervaart Theatre in Amsterdam, in the Vuurol Theatre Festival, with Samsara in the Healthy Festin Zeewolde, with Spirit Connection in The Manifest & the Unmanifest concerts in Weesp.
She continues learning, singing, performing vocal improvisation and overtone singing while offering private and group sound-healing sessions and workshops. Website
Ferdy Karto
Ferdy is a performer and author living in The Hague, the Netherlands. Versatility and ability to merge stories, melodies and movements are the characteristics of his work. His acting is defined by a strong intensity, timing, mimicry and expression.
Ferdy studied at the Actor School Rotterdam under the guidance of Bart Kiene and completed his education with Augusto Boalat at the Theater of the Oppressed. He has made appearances in short films and on stage, playing parts in classical Russian theatre.
His sketch-show FFSS, broadcasted on the Rotterdam TV City channel, showed the lighter, comical side of his work. As a storyteller, he contributed to the theatre piece Scherzando Trio; to Strong Love – a children theatre with live classical music; to Les Hiboux de verse, with Baratha Natyam classical dance; and to Argonaut 54, a solo programme combining comedy and music.
As a dancer, he performed flamenco in Aluda a Garuda, and in Niembooda Street. As a writer, he published articles, and fiction and non-fiction books. Website
The Cave 3.0 Overtone Choir
Mark van Tongeren – Overtone Kapellmeister
Photo: Nienke Berghuis.
Mark is a Dutch sound explorer with a deep interest in the synergy of arts, sciences and contemplative traditions. In his artistic work, he emphasizes performance/theatrical aspects of music and collaborates with improvisers, composers as well as dancers and visual artists. His ethnomusicological work focuses on the music of South-Siberia, Mongolia and Tibet. His book+CD Overtone Singing covers many aspects of this singing technique. As an artistic researcher, he received a PhD from Leiden University with his thesis Thresholds of the Audible and the performance Incognito Ergo Sum. He has taught independently and at universities in and outside of Taiwan, where he lives. Website Fusica Vimeo Youtube
Natascha Nikeprelevic
Natascha is a vocalist, an improviser, performer-composer and interpreter of contemporary music. She studied six years Intermedia Improvisation – Music, Painting, and Theater under the guidance of Michael Vetter at Accademia Capraia (Italy) and, for a further eight years, she taught at the same institution as a specialist for overtone singing, extended vocal techniques and structural theatre. Before she specialized entirely in music and vocalism, Natascha performed in several roles as a dancer and actress. On the basis of her poetic-dadaist vocalism, she developed a new form of musical theatre as a smooth transition between the genres of dance, music, performance and pantomime. Relevant for her theatrical maturity was a one-year internship at the Pina Bausch Tanztheater. As a dancer, she performed in Stockhausen’s Wednesday from Light; other significant inspirers were Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Eugenio Barba, and Kazuo Ohno, the Butoh dancer with whom she worked in a joint program at the Jooksan Dance Theatre Festival (Seoul, Korea). She has often been invited by the Odin Teatret for workshops and performances; on behalf of the WDR Radio (Cologne, Germany) she has composed RE S PONS – reaction on action, for mixed choir; she has aired a one-hour television interview at DA AI Television (Taipei, Taiwan) and, in the same city, given seminars at the Dharma Drum Buddhist University. With Michael Vetter, in Duo Transverbal, she focused on the implementation of improvisational concepts and travelled the world for concerts, seminars and projects, and released with him, since 1998, sixteen CDs and six radio plays. Numerous performances have taken her throughout Europe to concert halls, museums, churches, temples, caves and amphitheatre as well as regularly to festivals in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Natascha teaches voice improvisation, overtone singing and structural theatre, holding regular workshops and master classes throughout Europe, the Far East and Canada. Website Youtube
Rollin Rachele
Photo: Jochem Hart.
Rollin is an American born vocal artist and author with longstanding ties to Europe. He is an active member of the creative and scientific music and vocal community, working with fellow artists and scientists to further advance the dialogue and practice of cross-disciplinary collaboration. He has sung in numerous choirs and smaller Ensembles in the USA and Europe performing a wide range of early and contemporary music genres. He holds a First Class Honours degree in Indian Classical vocal performance from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire (London). He started experimenting with overtones in 1979 and specialised in Overtone Singing (1984) while living in The Netherlands, where his Overtone Singing Study Guide was first published (1989). Rollin has presented at various symposia for the voice, including The Voice Foundation (Philadelphia, USA). For around two decades he has worked in a theatrical context with various groups, including Unstructured Light, a form of multidisciplinary metaphysical theatre (The Netherlands, United Kingdom). Since 2009, he has been in on-going collaboration with composer and horn player Nic Korth in his Harmoniae Naturalis series (UK). He performs and teaches music and ethnomusicology internationally at universities and conservatories, and at health & well-being venues. Rollin is co-founder and creative director of the UK based Abundant Sun and is the inventor, founder and CEO of Clustas, a small start-up in the fitness industry. Website Vimeo
