Nice Guys Win Twice is an experimental musical theater piece created in collaboration between Berlin-based composer Jessie Marino, performance ensemble Scenatet, and Romanian multidisciplinary artist Constantin Basica, who created the abstract and immersive video design that runs through the entire performance.

Nice Guys Win Twice is a three-part work for ten performers, live electronic sound, and video landscape, wherein the ensemble performs a series of highly stylized rituals accentuating the uncanny absurdism at the core of our mundane lives. In the first part, everyday gestures such as adjusting glasses or simply lifting an arm are compiled into increasingly complex, rhythmic frameworks. In the second part, the performers remodel the language of a political address by simply removing the vowels. What is left is a series of percussive sounds – aggressive and vaguely threatening – that suddenly resemble cultish incantations. And in the third part, the performers build a wall out of what turns out to be vibrantly blinking television sets, transforming the entire stage into one large screen and thus exploring the boundaries between the physical and the digital.

Meanwhile, the music that anchors the performance is constantly changing from one stylistic extremity to the next, revealing our everyday lives to be a seemingly unlimited source of artistic potential.

Commissioned by the Darmstadt Summer Course, La Muse en Circuit, G((o))ng Tomorrow, Borealis, Transit Festival Leuven and HCMF

A 50 min. experimental music theater piece for 10 performers and video projection mapping.

Produced by La Muse en Circuit & Scenatet

Composition: Jessie Marino
Director of Video Production: Constantin Basica
Performance: Scenatet & Jessie Marino

The Danish Arts Foundation and The Danish Conductors Association