Katharina Rival - Hexentanzplatz

Hexentanzplatz

A music video for the song Hexentanzplatz from Alice Hubble's album Hexentanzplatz

Client: Alice Hubble
Area of responsibility: Video, Poster, Shirt
Topic: Entertainment - Diversity - Nature - Mystery - Feminism
Service: Concept - Illustration - Layout - Character Design - Animation

The song is named after the mountain Hexentanzplatz, a plateau in the Harz Mountains, very close to the Brocken. The mountain is full of legends about witches and Warpurgis Night, which were mentioned and discussed in Goethe's Faust and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.The witches in these writings, particularly in Faust, were given a rather negative role and Alice wanted to revisit this. The lyrics take some of the lines from these writings and turn them around. Obviously comparing a witch hunt to “the patriarchy” is nothing new, but it is important for her to take a stand against it. As someone who has felt labeled “other” her entire life, she wanted to write a song that celebrates diversity and fights against the limitations we place on ourselves. In the summer of 2020, Alice had the great fortune of visiting Germany to see the city where her partner grew up. During this visit, they kept listening to “Beautiful Madness” by Michael Patrick Kelly on the radio. Alice misunderstood the lyrics several times and kept hearing “Oh, what a beautiful mountain,” a lyric that resonated with her more than the original as they drove through the breathtaking Harz Mountains. It was a text that made her smile. An eternal optimist, she felt the need to write something in 2020 that was full of hope and positivity. Themes on the album in general are illusion and feminism (and obviously a very inclusive version of that). "Hexentanzplatz is a kind of mountain, but is actually an inclusive pop song that fights against the patriarchy. The song celebrates the wonders of nature, inclusivity and acceptance.

INSPIRASTION

Alice's love of patterns - in her clothes, in wallpaper, or curtains, which often form a framework for her videos, were also the starting point for this video. This is how the beginning came about - a city formed from geometric fragments, like a growing building set with which one can build potentially endless urban landscapes.

In addition to the angular pattern, I also chose a floral one, which I chose as wallpaper for the room, which initially adorned the wall in a gray and rigid manner, but would develop into a billowing world as the song progressed. The game betweenGeometric and organic, hard and soft, masculine and feminine, in an aesthetic that often only shows fragments, interspersed with VHS interference between the two extremes, I wanted to illustrate the dance for balance that takes place all around us as well as within us .

LYRICS

Lets sit here

And look on,

Time moves differently now

And it is like

A dream to me,

That we are like this,

In her presence

Oh what a beautiful mountain x8

Illusions we

Make to control

Trick the world and ourselves

The subtle moves

That they play

Infected organism grows

If you choose the mountain top

To light your path, take care

They’ll tell you

She’s lead you on,

They don’t understand her light,

In the darkness

Oh what a beautiful mountain X8

On this night,

We convene and we move our bodies

High about them we connect

Break the bonds,

Of what they think

A woman should now be

We can be anything here tonight, just dance with me

We’re not damaged as they say

We strive for own autonomy,

We dance we can,

because it’s what we know

The dance floor, gives the freedom we’re looking for

PROCESS

Except for the hair, most of the elements were created in Photoshop and then animated in After Effects. The hair is an exception and was animated frame by frame in TV Paint.In addition, some elements from earlier illustrations made it into the video. I was never a person who kept diaries. I leave the written word to others. My form, which could probably be similar to a diary, are playlists filled with music that accompanies me through the years and one of the biggest inspirations is the online music magazine the Quietus in London, which is also how I discovered Alice in 2019. They feed me and my playlists with new sounds, which I illustrate for myself, and it was a personal concern of mine to include elements from this journey in the video.

Thank you everyone for this adventure.