Sound is the ghost dancer of a performance, haunting everything, shadowing every gesture. It is a political marker. It is the friendly push towards high physical states. It is also a gateway to visual art and cinema in performance.
In this workshop, sound is considered in its materiality, as a texture, as a dancing body and not as a simple ornament to frame dance. It is a simple political and poetical position which supports the idea that the practice of sound points at the invisible and tenuous relation between bodies and other (im)materialities, contaminated by images, sketches of choreography, videos, texts, persons.
My proposal is to dive into all this at the same time. Play "music" and think about how to use sound in a performance, build a collective sound installation and learn how to listen. Reclaim dance and sound as burning physical desires. And then subvert and complicate that idea.
This is not a technical workshop. You don’t need to be a musician or a sound maker to come. Rather, this workshop is addressed to makers and choreographers in the making, hybrid art makers who want to explore and question the place of sound in performance - this thing that is between the body, the object and the poetical/political speech.
Of course, we’ll get our hands dirty and play with dangerous objects, building sound sculptures, exploring the extremes of sound making - from deep low bass frequencies to lo-fi pop and broken objects to singing and physical trance techniques.
We’ll also dance on things we don’t usually dance to and things we’ve always danced to.
We’ll also have a conceptual practice/open reflection.
We’ll have listening sessions.
We’ll try to steer in the horizon of the following questions:
How can sound subvert, sustain, comment on a performance?
How to introduce sound as a ghost dancer, and not as an ornament?
What are the ideologies conveyed by music "styles"?
How to keep it simple and not too nerdy?
We’ll also keep a historical line open, to see what has been made with sound in performance, and vice versa. We’ll try to learn from each other. We all hold this knowledge together.
Bring your toys if you have any (piano, dildo, bells, gameboy, rocks, water boiler). Bring pens and paper if you want. Anything for less than 2 euros from a flea market (walkman, tape, voice recorder, keyboard) is welcome. If you have a smartphone, bring it.
Listening sessions will include field recordings from Vietnam, Greek music, doom, electro-clash, Indian death prayer chanting, "nouvelle vague" cinema voice overs, West African disco and much more.
Making sessions will include the use of lo-fi material such as tapes, contact mics, rough dj, field recording, destroyed electro music, group singing.
Concept practice will include techniques coming from structural philosophy, experimental video, queer political art.
