The performance piece is inspired by a letter that Kafka wrote to Milena Jesenská by the end of March 1922, elaborating the idea that ‘The easy possibility of writing letters [...] must have brought wrack and ruin to the souls of the world.’ He claims that communication through letter writing yields ghost phenomena: ‘Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one's own ghost’. (See: Franz Kafka: Letters to Milena, trans. by Philip Boehm [New York: Schocken Books, 1990], p. 223.)
Following Kafka, Haunted Territories circles around the notion that modern communication creates ghostly presences, and this so even more, the more technological means are involved. It also addresses that, along the way of their exploration, fields of an in-betweenness evolve appearing to be 'haunted'. For, every time we enter unknown and unexplored terrain we have to overcome our fear and insecurities. In order to cross and push boundaries and to endure crises, we need fearlessness and a claiming quality, strength and persistence, stamina and an incessant joy for exploration, even in public, which is the case when, with regard to vocal, sonic and bodily practices, the performer allows their intermingling, intersecting and imbuing of each other. Choosing the title as such aims to point towards those fields of intersections and overlappings that come into being precisely because of the unusual entanglement and merge of one single performance practice with the other.
The aim of Haunted Territories is not only to map out hitherto barely explored performance territories, but also to offset the performance-typical practice demarcations and abolish the conventional approach in order to open up the spaces between the oral, vocal, bodily, sonic and musical sphere towards an expanded field of vocal art performance which, within this context, allows to make exceptional experiences for both the performer and the audience.
Shortly after the premiere Florencia Lamarca (dance), Alex Nowitz (vocal performance with live electronics) and Sukandar Kartadinata (software programming) meet the questions and comments from the audience.
Haunted Territories
is a vocal and bodily performance art piece for two soloists, a female dancer and a male vocal performer using gesture-controlled live electronics, the strophonion. The video documentation gives account of the premiere performance on 4 February 2018 in studio A of the RADIALSYSTEM V Berlin. Consisting of two parts, it presents a duet performance addressing the encounter of contemporary dance, as performed by Florencia Lamarca, with those from vocal performance art, either using the live electronic extension or not. The second part of Haunted Territories is a solo featuring voice, body and strophonion. It aims to map the performance terrain of vocal sound dance, a performance practice that emerges when the logics of vocal (vocalogy), sound technological and bodily practices (corporalogy) meet and interweave. Furthermore, Haunted Territories constitutes the premiere of the software for the wireless, live electronic instrument, the strophonion, developed from scratch and programmed by Berlin-based instrument maker Sukandar Kartadinata based on the audio processing software Max. For an in-depth study on background information, performance and reflection see the essay 'Intercourse with Ghosts': 'Haunted Territories' revisted, as attached on the right side or published within this exposition at https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/492687/559938/2260/655.
Further insights into the software configuration of the strophonion (status June 2018) based on the audio processing software Max 7 are available here: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/492687/496731.
