Jonathan Nagel

Bassist

•

Performing artist

•

Poet

Stories can be told in words, played with sounds, showed through acting or felt through movement and touch. Jonathan Nagel’s artistic work in the last year has been to combine all those elements, in order to create a hybrid performance comprising all those facets and experimenting with different ways how they can merge into each other and be entangled in a whole Gesamtkunstwerk.

Dreamy fantasy worlds, spiritual awakening, existentialist questions and the paradox connection between devotion, delusion and depression all get combined in multi-faceted mystic performance. Transformation is the key element, which enables us to see a stream of thought from all possible sides. We can observe a word become motion, which then turns into sound, that triggers a new constellation in space, giving way for another metaphor. So we keep turning things around until we have fully seen them from all sides, only to understand that we do not understand anything but the awe of the miraculousness of life.

In collaboration with various artists there have been explorations in this field as an ongoing performance series throughout the last months in Berlin, peaking in a performance and album recording in February, 2018. For this next step in Summer 2018, Jonathan has gathered a group of his long time collaborators and internationally acclaimed artists, coming together from the improvising art scenes of Berlin, Cape Town, Barcelona and Amsterdam.