a research project by Juan Corres
if we neglect the listening, how can we relate to the enviroment?
How would it be to listen to dance through the radio? What can sonic choreography be? This choreographic research was set in motion by this questions and a whole series of thoughts arose from the apparent oxymoron in creating a dance not to be seen: what is choreography when it becomes something to listen to, what differentiates it from music, what would it look like, what does the audience “see” when they can only listen…
Together with those ideas I was inspired to learn and explore more about the characteristics and qualities of electromagnetic and sound waves, as well as to play with the visible/invisible and audible/inaudible in dance.
Christina Kubisch has been one of the inspirational artists during this research. She belongs to the first generation of sound artists. I found connections to the practice both in her work around field recordings as well as electromagnetism.
In the studio I worked in collaboration with dancer Yuri Shimaoka, and at a later stage musician Antoine Mermet joined us.
By reflecting on the medium of radio and sound, embodying some of those thoughts, and listening to our sessions, we came to set up a very open space for movement and listening. Parallel to that never-ending flow of the radio, in our set up time gets stretched and movement happenings are somehow taking place eternally. The room we are in becomes a sound field through the use of our bodies in relation to everything present in the space, including some electrical elements (microphone, synthesiser, wide band receiver), all of these become amplifiers of our dance.
sound is a wave of air pressure
sound cartography
ETHER, by Soma laboratories is a wide-band receiver that makes it possible to perceive the electromagnetic landscape around you. ETHER is a kind of anti-radio
eternal dance
light is a wave of the electric and magnetic fields
In Sonic possible worlds (Bloomsbury, 2021), while reflecting on the possibility of sound Salomé Voegelin mentions “the capacity of radio to question objective time through the blind temporality of its continuous stream, and its ability to subvert the spatiality of the actual world through the invisible spatiality of its medium: creating a space “out of the dark from the unexpected moves of sound””.
In the same book, she dedicates a chapter to “Listening to the inaudible: the sound of unicorns”
Gefördert durch die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien im Programm NEUSTART KULTUR, Hilfsprogramm DIS-TANZEN des Dachverband Tanz Deutschland.
