Thunderstruck (The Tesla project)

Thunderstruck returns to a time when art and science harnessed natural energy for crafting magical devices. In a wonderful act of science and hubris, mixing intimate storytelling with electronic drones from the deep and a singing Tesla coil, it welcomes you to the twilight zone between showmanship and science.

Thunderstruck is one part of the Tesla project - a series of works investigating electricity and the legacy of Nikola Tesla.

Modern science says: The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future. From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom. (…)

Meanwhile the cheering lights of science and art, ever increasing in intensity, illuminate our path, and the marvels they disclose, and the enjoyments they offer, make us measurably forgetful of the gloomy future.

—Nikola Tesla “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”, 1900

The story begins with the tale of Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor who in the end of the 19th century brought us several of our century’s most important innovations in electricity and wirelessness. One of his magical machines was the Tesla coil, an electrical resonant transformer circuit used to produce high-voltage, low- current, high frequency alternating-current electricity. Basically, a machine that shoots lightning bolts.

In Thunderstruck, the figure of the genius artist-inventor reemerges in Stina Nyberg’s Goddess of electricity. She mixes intimate storytelling with growling dances and death-defying encounters with the singing Tesla coil on stage, piercing melodies across the metal drones composed by Maria W Horn. In the intersection between art, science and political utopia, this performance makes guts vibrate and wonders appear.

There is a lack of public fascination for electricity, and Stina Nyberg is here to cure that.

PRESS:

Recension: Thunderstruck - MDT, Skeppsholmen | SvD
Stina Nybergs elektriska seans på USA-turné | SvD