What is it like for the female violist of the Vienna Philharmonic as she attends her real-life re­hearsals? How does a woman carpenter working in Lucerne talk about her professional life? And to what extent do their experiences overlap or differ from each other? These questions are the starting point for the project The Conductress by Sophia Martell  (*1988, Berlin) and Silke Strahl (*1988, Bad Saul­gau). The two artists impressed the selection committee with a project that addresses the theme of this year’s Lucerne Festival, ‘PrimaDonna’, in an exciting and multifaceted way and which will be produced during the course of the Festival. At the same time, the project opens our eyes to the role of women in society.

For The Conductress, the two artists will conduct interviews with musicians and visitors to Lucerne Festival as well as with women from Lucerne. These will form the basis for their experimental documentary-artistic work. Together with atmospheric visual and sound recordings of the Festival and observations of women in their daily professional lives, a great variety of narratives of women will be inter­woven into a multi-media performance. These stories are by the same token narrative elements and provide the starting point for abstract musical material with which the musicians will improvise. The elements of imagery and music will vary, alternating between documentation and abstraction, between personal experiences and generalized assertions. The result is a multi­media performance by VJs, female electronic musicians, and female musicians under the direc­tion of a conductress, which will be performed twice during the Festival’s final week.