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The most important thing before starting to play is to have a shared starting point that will develop into the composition created by voice, viola and electronics. I divided the poem into different characters of expression, where Guisela made a distinction between the expression and emotion of each paragraph. Below is my interpretation and how I organized it in a way that makes it easy to express it with the three different art expressions:

• First Paragraph: This section talks about how she is going to write about her experience of good and bad experiences in her life being a woman. The metaphor she uses is sun and thunderbolts - opposite ideas. With these two contrasting words, a mysterious atmosphere is created. The idea is that the dancer starts the performance alone, in order to express mystery from the beginning. Here Marcela and I are siting back to back at the border of the stage. During the first lines of the poem, I imagine timbres different from what classical viola musicians are used to, something with air, which develops until it turns into a fast, nasty and unclear sound, which finishes unexpectedly in a fortissimo and crescendo note. Before jumping to the next paragraph, there is a long silence where the resonance and the harmonics of the instrument continue vibrating until it dies, then everything becomes silent – comparable to the storm that Guisela is talking about in the poem. After big thunderbolts, the sky is calm.
• The second and third paragraphs are joined together in the performance. Guisela says all her memories are in her bones. The reason she uses the bones as a metaphor is because bad memories are very deep in herself and impossible to forget. This will be interpreted with the viola as a dark sound with long notes. In order to achieve that, I added a rubber between the C and G strings. In the third paragraph she uses is her long hair to represent long silences, addressing what we want to say but are forbidden to. She has to agree to everything with “short smiles” in order to be polite. In this part, the music will continue being melancholic and soft. The dancer will react on the improvised music using movements that define the impotence that Guisela and other women experienced; Patricia is showing the ‘feminism symbol’ with her hand, as well as putting both hands over her ears, symbolizing that she is tired of listening what she hears and wants to scream and moan in pain.
• In the forth paragraph she comments on the things she desired to do but she could only keep them hidden and save them as a treasure. With this metaphor makes is clear how much she would like to do them. The author talks about dancing, flying, dreaming and laughing, and relates these things to different parts that of the body: the knees, the feet, the desire and the look. She explains how she feels living in a society where she cannot be herself. This part was interpreted very rhythmically, where 2 cards were inserted between the strings and playing pizzicato; so the strings have less vibration and creating a special sound.
• In the fifth paragraph, the poem comes back again to a nostalgic mode, where Marcela is reciting the poem and this is modified by electronics. I liked the idea of just having a woman’s voice reciting this, because she is talking about her life in a nostalgic way.
• The sixth and seventh paragraphs are expressing musically the same as the fifth paragraph. This revolves around the fear coming from the injustices making her suffer, provoking tension and anger within herself. The seventh paragraph begins with movements and very fast notes preparing for the climax of the poem, and end in a fortissimo, to express the rage over the impotence she feels. The electronics help to create this contrast and to express these emotions in a more intense way. This paragraph is the strongest one, the culmination part of the performance. After that there is big silence; the calm comes back again guiding us to the next paragraph.
• To conclude, the last two paragraphs are musically joined. There is acceptance of all that was mentioned before. The only thing she can do is to accept that there will be change in the future, and she will never stop fighting for this change where an old-fashioned society can embrace equal rights for both sexes. At the end she wrote: finally, this all will be remembered as old memories. To illustrate this, I made a connection back to the first paragraph, where the dancer and me move together; she is the skin Guisela talks about at the beginning of the poem, and the viola is the words she can not express, so it has with unclear sound, though there is physical contact between them.

3.1 Design of the artistic project

Guisela Lopez

The translation would be:

Woman Inhabited by Words

I write from my skin,

I record

its memories of suns

and thunderbolts.

From my bones,

that gather memories,

in barks of rain.

My hair

is a long silence,

my smiles

short polite phrases.

I keep verbs

in my muscles

dancing – in my knees.

flying – in my feet.

dreaming – in my desire.

laughing – in my gaze.

Nostalgia
open horizons,
golden winds,
of the summer on my skin.

I write

about the fear that invades the city

and installs itself on the ends of my nerves,
on top of the numerous injustices
that tense up my ligaments.

My body pronounces

grave words,

deaf conjugations...
my cells beat.

Despite the storm

my heart

glimpses new worlds.

Maritime memories

tell my story

of a woman

inhabited by words.

For the poem it was necessary to decide on the emotions, colours and sounds in every segment, in order to be able to communicate every emotion and feeling Guisela expresses. We needed to agree on the same ideas for the improvisation.

I was creating a different sonority compared to what classical musicians are used to do. I was very curious about how I could explore new sounds with my viola. Further, I connected a microphone to my instrument. With a computer, my sonology colleague looked for different effects that that surprised me and motivated me to continue exploring. In this way I explored the sounds and colours in my instrument and maximized the dynamics and the expression. I had the feeling I could enhance my ideas and make the contrasts more in order to reach the audience.