Knowing We Won’t Have Each Other Forever
Stine Janvin & Ula Sickle: ECHOIC CHOIR
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What are we looking for at night? A new collaboration between vocalist Stine Janvin and choreographer Ula Sickle, Echoic Choir evokes the ritual of coming together on a dance floor around music in the late hours of the night. Relying on the power of acoustic voices and spatial resonance, the project aims to create a collective and immersive sensorial event, by placing the performers and the audience in a shared space, like a rave or nightclub. Sound, choreography and the visual aspects of the work, such as light, create a strong synesthetic experience for the audience.
Echoic Choir is presented as part of Bergen Kunsthall’s live programme strand Knowing We Won’t Have Each Other Forever which takes queer realities and ideas of the ephemeral as its departure point. Together, we will explore the possibilities of alternative world-making, thinking through movement and live practices. The experiential, more sensory character of this art form, and its ephemerality, open up new contemporary perspectives on intersectionality.
We will play around with temporalities, alter realities, producing new takes on the present as a means of coming together and finding ways of exercising freedom. A moving target, the ever-changing idea of queerness is hard to aim at. To move, to dance, to flounder is to shake off labels – challenging viewers’ expectations and pre-assumptions of the straight linear narratives – and reshaping the overall understanding of what is considered possible.
Concept, composition: Stine Janvin
Concept, choreography: Ula Sickle
With: Michelle Cheung, Sidney Barnes, Annalise van Even, Roman Ole, Stine Janvin, Ula Sickle (originally with Rishin Singh) Libretto
Dramaturgy: Persis Bekkering
Costumes: Wang Consulting Lights: Ofer Smilansky (originally with Marcel Weber/MFO)
Sound: Raphael Hénard (originally with Olivia Oyama)
Research: Amanda Barrio Charmelo, Lisa Vereertbrugghen
Shuffle steps: Harrison and Hlyan
Coproduction: Wiener Festwochen, MUNCH (Oslo), STUK House for Dance, Image and Sound (Leuven), Dampfzentrale Bern
With the support of: the Flemish Community, the Flemish Community Commission, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin
Program Residencies: Kunstenwerkplaats (Brussels), DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Dampfzentrale Bern Executive production
Diffusion: Future Works
Curated by Nora-Swantje Almes.
Knowing We Won’t Have Each Other Forever operates with a sliding scale. Should you have questions about the ticket system, please get in touch via: bergen@kunsthall.no with the subject line “Echoic Choir Tickets”. If you find yourself in a position of hardship, please contact this email address to enquire about free tickets.
Upcoming Knowing We Won’t Have Each Other Forever:
Tygapaw (Live)
Fri 16 Sep
Dion Mckenzie known as TYGAPAW, is a Producer, DJ and Artist, originally from Mandeville, Jamaica, and based in Brooklyn, New York. A polymathic artist injecting their Jamaican heritage into techno, TYGAPAW operates at the intersections of their musical and cultural roots.
Dykegeist
Eve Stainton (sound world by Mica Levi)
Sat 12 Nov
Dykegeist is a choreographic work from Manchester-born London-based artist and performance maker Eve Stainton—with a live sound world conceived by musician Mica Levi. Dykegeist unravels and complicates the archetypal narratives assigned to the lesbian predator creature. During the current of the evening, aesthetics will shift between a supernatural gothic thriller, a 90’s sci-fi spider lair, a haunted Manchester club scene, an abstract and warping horror-scape, a social situation to discuss threat/the phobic/ consent/ otherness, choreography and suspended encounters, gateways gravel grunge, emptiness and charged-ness.