Monika Błaszczak, Elias Brown VEXATIONS

„Vexations“ is a durational performance by musician Elias Brown and dance artist Monika Błaszczak, based on Erik Satie’s enigmatic composition, written around 1893-1894. The score consists of a brief musical theme to be repeated 840 times, after the composer’s suggested preparation “in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.”
Composed during Satie’s involvement with the esoteric Ordre du Temple de la Rose + Croix, the piece remained unpublished during his lifetime, only to be rediscovered and premiered by John Cage in 1963. Brown and Błaszczak reimagine Vexations as a 12-hour work for solo dancer and piano. Satie’s deceptively simple, wandering theme is set against a minimalist choreography where the recursive repetition of a single movement pattern generates slow, granular evolution.
The work invites audiences into a dense present tense, challenging the stability of our perception in the face of an increasingly fluid reality. Can repetition open a portal to transformation? In homage to Cage’s gesture from the premiere performance, audience members will receive a one euro refund of their ticket cost per hour spent in attendance.

Date & time: 7th March 2026, 10:00AM – 10:00PM

With kind support of theaterhaus berlin.