In 1897, the Swedish engineer Salomon Andrée attempted a flight from Spitzbergen to the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon. This project was doomed to failure: Andrée and his companions perished after the crash landing of the balloon and their subsequent months of progress on foot on the island of Kvitøya. The volatility of this type of expedition is combined with the intangibility of music and dance. Andrée’s balloon expedition has parallels with a core characteristic of dance: levitation, elevation and the attempt to overcome the force of gravity which however ultimately wins the upper hand. The title is an allusion to the final entry in Andrée’s expedition logbook: “nach Hause 7 Uhr morgens” [’going home at 7 o’ clock in the morning’].
nach Hause is based on the fundamental concept of a performance as an ’expedition’. The progress of the work appears as a cycle spanning all phases from the preparation right up to the ultimate failure of the expedition. The climax is reached with a ’freeze’: a state of absolute motionless. The dimensions of this progress are heightened by the freedom to begin at a different point within the cycle for each performance – alongside the ‘narrative’ variant, numerous other combinations are possible in which the beginning and end of the events do not coincide with the beginning and end of the performance itself. Benjamin Schweitzer