VOICEWORKS.
13th & 14th of September 2020, online.
IKLECTIK off-site
The first thing we do when we lift the text off the page is to simply speak it; it is in our voice that poetry meets performance -- but what else can happen in that space?
What frictions, alliances, splits and reconciliations can we find beyond our expectations of what voice can do in poetic performance? What can take place between the textual, our physical voice and the political act of speaking out, of delivering speech?
Voiceworks, the first of our SLANT events, showcased experimental uses of voice in poetic performance.
OUR PROGRAMME
The event included a new performance piece by Co-Curator Serena Braida, who was joined by two headliners, Emma Bennett & Kinga Toth, and three brilliant performers we had the pleasure of discovering through our open call: Richard McReynolds, Anamaria Burduli, and L M B (Lou Barnell and Lisa Busby).
Their works explored the ways — embodied, aesthetical, political — in which sound and meaning can be negotiated between speaker, space, and listener; through a range of poetic experiences in which languages collide, words spill into sound, speech is layered, manipulated, deconstructed, and listening becomes an immersive collaborative practice.
We released a Curators’ Note with Tentacular Magazine detailing our curatorial approach, as well as two sets of reviews including responses from practitioners Lola Nieto, Nicol Parkinson, & Mark Leahy, as well as Calliope Michail, Dylan Williams, & Hippolyte Broud.
OUR ONLINE FORMAT
Voiceworks was initially intended to be a live event. Moving this event online instead of postponing it allowed us to continue supporting our artistic community at a time when it feels most important by showcasing the work of brilliant interdisciplinary performers in a safe and accessible way.
We are very grateful for IKLECTIK’s consistent support throughout this time. Our performers showed incredible flexibility and resilience in adapting and responding to the constraints of this new online format.
Times:
VOICEWORKS [Part 1]: Sunday 13th of September, from 8pm to 9pm (BST)
VOICEWORKS [Part 2]: Monday 14th of September, from 8pm to 9pm (BST)
Location: Online at IKLECTIK off-site
Tickets: FREE, no booking required.
Streaming links:
[Part 1]: https://youtu.be/itTO1bRkrLE
[Part 2]: https://youtu.be/TYBOCkHb1hU
Voiceworks: Part 1.
13/09/20, 8pm GMT, IKLECTIK off-site
L M B.
L M B is an ongoing collaborative project and space of shared making for Lou Barnell and Lisa Busby - to consider relationships of body, voice and sound in composition, improvisation and performance. Their work together begins from the starting principle of listening as a whole-body phenomenon; and sounding, singing and moving as ways of hearing. L M B works through negotiations, tracings and intimacies between bodies; repetition as revisitation; and embodiments of intangibles, lists and empty work tasks - all as tools to orientate and negotiate meaning in the moment of performance itself. Their process often involves generating, abstracting, then reconstituting textual, vocal and movement material in dreamlike collages of fragments. For Voiceworks their performance reflects on a 2018 site specific improvisation - the gulf between this early process work, its focus on the tactile experience of the performers' entangled bodies; and the current restricted performance landscape, distanced intimacy and care.
For more information about Lou and Lisa, take a look at their websites:
https://www.loubarnell.co.uk/
Serena Braida.
Serena Braida is a London-based performer, voice practitioner, poet and writer working at the intersection of text, theatre and performance. A mezzo-soprano, she joined her first choir at age 6 and grew up singing sacred and choral music. Subsequently, and parallel to her studies in critical theory, Serena went on to train in Vocal Jazz, Free Improvisation and Acting. She specialised in Voice at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and teaches practical voice, text and speech in higher education. Serena has created and performed sound and voice pieces in the UK and abroad. Notable performances include the Festival of Italian Literature in London, the Bucharest International Poetry Festival, Goldsmiths LitLive, the European Poetry Festival among others. In 2018, Serena launched her poetry pamphlet BLUE SHEILA (dancing girl press) at the Vortex Jazz Club in London, creating a score for a collaborative performance that included soundscapes, voicework and song.
For more information about Serena’s practice, take a look at her website: https://www.serenabraida.com/
Richard McReynolds.
Richard McReynolds is a composer of acoustic and electronic music. He has recently finished a PhD at Cardiff University where he explored how performer freedom can be scored to create organic interaction between electronic and acoustic instrumentalists.Sound poetry is a relatively new approach in his practice. In all of his work exploration of sound is the main aim. He first performed vocal material in 2018 when performing a piece by Cardiff based Dada artist Will Salter. He has since looked to incorporate it into his practice. Sound poetry is exciting as it is such an embodied and immediate form. It feels like a perfect foil to combine with electronic sounds.
For more information about Richard’s practice, take a look at his website: http://richardmcreynolds.com/
Voiceworks: Part 2.
14/09/20, 8pm GMT, IKLECTIK off-site
Emma Bennett.
Emma Bennett is a performer, writer and teacher based in Dublin. Her work explores public address, in its variously compromised forms. Over the past decade, she has conducted academic research into joking, theatrical representation, and the aesthetics of labour. This research stems from and informs her work with the voice, a creative practice that has unfolded as a series of negotiations around the idea of the professional “gig”. Not only being onstage, but all the associated micro-performances of being the person about to go onstage, or the person who just was onstage: all these challenges require coping mechanisms, technological fixes. In time, these makeshift solutions become scores for performance. Compositions emerging from this process have taken up the exalted rhythms of birdsong (Bird Series, 2012-present), the nervous chit-chat of the performer (WHAT MATTER 2016), and the irritated attempt to explain the workings of a synthesiser (A Superficial Way, 2019).
For more information about Emma’s practice, take a look at her website:
https://emmabennettperformance.wordpress.com/
Kinga Tóth.
Kinga Tóth writes and publishes short stories, poems and drama pieces in Hungarian, German and English. She is a musician, extensive vocalist, visual and sound- poet, presents her work in performances, exhibitions and installations internationally (e.g. MANIFESTA 11 Zürich; CROWD; OFF Biennale; Wechselstorm Galerie; Akademie Schloss Solitude). She is also a philologist and teacher and has worked as a journalist, copy editor of art magazines, and cultural program organizer. Tóth’s international publications include poetry collections PARTY (PRAE, 2013, Hungary; BIRDS LCC, U.S.A. 2018), All Machine (2014, Hu and Allmaschine, Akademie Schloss Solitude, 2014), Village 0-24 (Eng, Melting Books 2016), Wir bauen eine Stadt (De, Parasitenpresse 2016) and a visual-art catalogue: Textbilder (GEDOK, 2016-2017). Her novel, The Moonlight Faces (The Lost Words Verlag, Netherlands; Magvető 2017) won the Hazai Attila and best novel special prizes in Hungary. She was recently awarded the Hugo Ball Förderpreis for her intermedia art and literary work.
For more information about Kinga’s practice, take a look at her website: http://www.kingatoth.com/
Anamaria Burduli.
Anamaria is a theatre and performance student with an interest in post-structuralist poetry and dadaism. She is training to be a multimedia artist and likes to layer the rhythm and texture of Georgian and English language to compose a vocal fugue through polyphonic form. She tries to experiment with vocal capabilities in creating instrumentless music. She combines video art with similarly disjointed audio pieces and comes into dialogue with her own voice in a grotesque-tragic-comic-ironic style.