For Sounding Bodies (Space for Free Arts, Helsinki, 14.11.2020) I had been looking for an even closer relation between sound and visuals. During the summer 2019 I joined the PSi Artistic Research Working Group in the conference Performance Studies international, on the theme Elasticity, held in Calgary, Canada (http://psi-artistic-research-working-group.blogspot.com/2019/), with convenors Bruce Barton, Johanna Householder, and Annette Arlander. The task was to react with a paper and/or a performance to someone else’s written material or video; later another presenter (the following one in the chain) would react to the new input. I was assigned an article by Christoph W. Pirker, a theoretical article written by a performance and visual artist, musician, composer. I wrote the paper “Embodied Thought, Human Gesture and Performative Space”, presented together with a video extract from Between words and life. Pirker’s response to Gerhard Liska’s reaction to my presentation (a video with animated puppets) was A Thing Called Nature, “an ongoing painting series that investigates nature as performative agency, decolonized medium, and carrier of anthropocenic eccide”. That autumn I still extracted a core question from Birgitte Bauer-Nielsen’s research, in “Dismantling the Splits” (published in the working group’s blog, see link above.)
This experience, together with the reflections about embodiment of the past years (through the courses of Eeva Anttila, “Embodiment in (artistic) research” 2017-18) and the previous artistic works, built up a need for bodily expression and performativity become explicit in Sounding Bodies. I decided to use analogue sound in connection with analogue projectors, instead of including analogue projections through the digital medium (as in the first two projects). Being a spectator over the years of Marek’s audiovisual performances, I thought to include the projectors as “instrumental bodies” and sound sources. This entailed for us both to be present and active as performers. Another decision was to develop the music material through guided improvisation, based on texts in different languages (Finnish, Italian, Russian – the performers’ native languages – and English).
The process started with the recordings of the texts with the dance makers’ voices (Giorgio Convertito and Vera Lapitskaya); based on these, I recorded with Timo Pyhälä (double bass) some instrumental sound material – improvised while listening to the vocal tracks. Marek shot two films with each of the dance makers, and I composed a soundtrack for them with the recorded sound material, then printed on the 16 mm film.
Sounding Bodies was developed upon actions and acoustic situations suggested by the texts, which guided the audience through a journey in four steps across the space: the texts were a quote from “On a twirling shoe” (Pirker 2019) and three collections of fragments from Lalla Romano’s poems.
The piece was developed during workshops with the musicians, dancers, film maker, and sound engineer (Alejandro Olarte) during the week preceding the performance. The method was guided improvisation, inspired, among others, to Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations.
The first part, with the audience still standing close to the main door, was a bodily exploration (with the six musicians and one dancer’s bodies and voices) of Pirker’s prose about bodily self-awareness disclosing “a new type of reality”.
This led to the second part, where the acoustic sound was matched by the sounds of a projector, oscillators, pedals, joined by the dancers’ duo on the theme of foreignness (with abstract images by a second projector) – in this part the audience was invited to seat further in the hall.
In the third part musicians and dancers performed while walking to a third space, inviting the audience to follow them: it was a path of acoustic exploration, from the main hall through a small room, to end up in a perpendicular corridor. While walking, slowly we started to hear sounds culminating in a sort of scream, from Marek’s performance with oscillators and coils – I joined him as a performer soon after. The space was lit in red (light designer Jere Suontausta) and sonified with two projectors, oscillators, pedals, coils, two cellos and double bass, with projected images painted live. The theme of this part was a sort of visit inside the body (in Romano’s words “A deep sound is in the blood”, “I am in you / in the mysterious way / that life is dissolved in blood / and mixed in breath.”). The transition to the fourth and last part was led by the musicians, using their vocal and instrumental voices on the same texts, followed by the audience through the previous path.
The audience’s attention was attracted on the way (in the middle of the first hall) by a double bass and film duo, where I played the film using the projector’s optical sound.
Finally the audience was invited to seat at the bottom of the hall, where the film dyptich was simultaneously projected, with the two dancers moving each in front of their own film. Slowly the musicians emerged from behind, along the walls, playing/voicing by the screen to reach the front of the scene, while the dancers played on the theme of distance, calling each other from afar (Vera started from the hall bottom, getting closer to the performance space, while Giorgio reached her from the other side). At the end they both joined the musicians in the front, sharing with them bodies and voices.
Keywords: mechanical/human bodies, native languages, words, dance, visiting spaces, resonances, optical sound, film painting, improvisation, performance.
Sounding Bodies 2020
Paola Livorsi, concept and electronics
Marek Pluciennik, analogue projectors and 16 mm film
Giorgio Convertito and Vera Lapitskaya, dance makers
Jousitus ensemble
Hermanni Yli-Tepsa, violin
Maija Holopainen, violin
Dominik Schlienger, viola
Saara Viika, cello
Aino Juutilainen, cello
Timo Pyhälä, double-bass
Alejandro Olarte, sound engineer
Jere Suontausta, light designer