2KW

2KW is an experimental music theater company based in Helsinki, formed by singer and sound artist Annika Fuhrmann, composer and cellist Wilson Tanner Smith, and composer and performer Charles Quevillon. We make staged work that sits somewhere between chamber opera, ritual, and installation, built with energy and consumption in mind.

The name borrows from Zurich's 2000-Watt Society, which proposes that a good life can be lived on roughly 2000 watts of continuous power per person, without sacrificing what actually matters. (For reference, the Western European average is closer to 6000.) We've taken that aspiration and pointed it at our own field: the concert hall, the opera house, the touring infrastructure of contemporary performance.

Our aim is to produce low-carbon multidisciplinary work without sacrificing emotional weight, aesthetic and symbolic experience, social bonding, or reflection on the contemporary condition. That, after all, is what we think live performance is for. (But don't worry, our prices will remain competitive.)

In practice, this means a flexible core trio joined by guest collaborators: video artists, dancers, circus performers. We work with acoustic instruments, voice, candlelight, low-power LEDs, battery-powered electronics, and reused or salvaged gear. While we work inside the infrastructure we're critiquing, the concert halls and opera houses, we also develop in-situ projects and collaborations with like-minded ensembles, such as GaiaStage, whose pedal-powered performance platform turns the audience itself into the power source.

Productions

Newsletter

Contact