Borealis Festival
Sounding Bodies
, 20:45
In a special commission for the evening, artists Phoebe Collings-James and Last Yearz Interesting Negro present their new performance piece Sound as Weapon, Sounds 4 Survival, an ensemble of solo and entwined bodies and cut up rnb and dub loops.
Charting psycho-emotional landscapes and mapping them on to the physical, the artists work with their multi-dimensional bodies as the primary technology and source material for a collaborative live performance that is embodied through a symbiotic relationship between dance, music and sculpture. The group forms a chorus centred around a conceptual deconstruction of ‘percussion’ as it functions instrumentally and also as a radical proposition to the various ways you could think about the power of ‘striking an object’ and the impact of the sonic as resonating frequencies and vibrations. Their bodies navigate the sensory labour of being ‘played’.
For each performance of this work, Phoebe Collings-James and Jamila Johnson-Small a.k.a. Last Yearz Interesting Negro are joined by a different cast of three other artists. The cast for this performance includes Sophia Brown, Rebecca Burt and Yasmine Akim.
Renowned Norwegian musician and author Jenny Hval gives us a glimpse at a new body of work that explores the embodied and disembodied voice, working with the music that comes from the spoken word and combining multiple voices. Following Jenny Hval is a live performance from the American artist Colin Self whose Siblings project is full of ecstatic voices and explosive electronics, physically proposing new models for interdependence, critical joy, and an expansive sense of being, challenging binary descriptions in a performance that is part choir and part club. To close the evening we have invited Jiska Huizing to do one of her DJ-sets that combines sounds of nature with dark electronic music, eerie film scores and driving rhythms, inviting you to open up your ears and move your feet!
Sound as Weapon, Sounds 4 Survival is commissioned by Bergen Kunsthall and Sonic Acts as part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Based on work originally commissioned and developed by Wysing Arts Centre with funding from Arts Council England.