Re-scoring oral stages is a meeting
of SoundDance Artists Irena Tomazin and Jule Flierl. The research in 2020
prepares a performance work that will premiere in 2021. They will relate their
own practices and methods of vocalizing Dance to the impactful body of work by
Katalin Ladik. The latter is established as an important step in the genealogy
of the underacknowledged history of SoundDance.
So then, what is
SoundDance?
What kind of movement is it?
Is it about movement?
Is it a movement?
The method of working will be
guided by the ambiguous relation between Notation and live performance. As M.
van Imschoot points out in her essay „ What's the score?“, the definition of
performance as disappearance (P. Phelan) overlooks the traces and imprints of
live performance. Arguing with R. Schneider, she defines performance as memory,
imprinted in the body, through the different processes of transmission. She
develops the metaphor of the score as the bones and the live performance as the
flesh of the performance.
In studying and reinterpreting the
notations of Ladik, the bones of her work, Tomazin and Flierl will slip their
own flesh over the skeleton of her written work, creating a physical melange of
cyborg anatomy.
Ladik's Notations will be ingested,
digested, vomited out and melted on the performers' tongue, hosting and
transforming words, thoughts and intentions of a third person, of another time
and another context.
SoundDance happens on the
Oral Stage, a real
Tongue-Twister
and Hyperventilator.
SoundDance reproduces
the chaos of the world
on the threshold of
ingestion,
a gesture of digestion
that suggests:
Dance! Otherwise we're
mute!
The result of the research will be
a practical and theoretical exploration of the mediation of voice through
different histories of governance and performance making.
There will be performance material,
writing in the forms of theory and manifestos, as well as notations, that are
visual objects and scores that are activated by performance.
Motivation
Jule Flierl has been engaged in writing the history of
sound-dance for 5 years, through original choroegraphic works, intensive
research into the lives and works of sound dance pioneers, and through the
curation of the series From Breath to Matter in Berlin. This history is not yet
written – and it is one that must be told.
Katalin Ladik started to work in the 1960's in a highly
ideological time when language was shaping reality. All of her poetic practice,
however, is about looking behind the language and incorporating utterances
beyond language, bringing that into explicitly feminist and political discourse
with the world around her. Where the primacy of language took precedent, she
went deeper into physicality, embodiment, risking incoherence while also
strategically eliding censorship. Flierl and Tomazin's own works have been
following in this legacy, searching within the tonalities, textures and
expansive qualities of the human voice beyond speech, or deep within it. Thus
the connection has to be made, for the deepening of their artistic practices
toward new work in 2021, but also for the sake of writing this legacy. This
twofold urgency is why their work is as much archival and research oriented as
it is practice based, with 2020 focusing on research, interview, writing,
recording, and movement research, and 2021 on the production of an original
collaborative work.
Tomazin and Flierl wish to initiate the final phase of
their research at Pact Zollverein.
They will alternate between reading scores, interpreting
scores, mutating scores, writing their own scores and performing them for each
other in the studio. They plan (sound+visual) recordings of their
interpretations in various spaces with differing resonances in the
post-industrial architectures at Zollverein. How does the same score unfold in
a different setting?
