Sound is the ghost dancer of a performance, haunting everything and following every gesture. It is a political marker and a gentle nudge towards altered physical states.
Ghost dancer is a sound shaping and listening workshop aimed at performers and hybrid artists, but it is also a practical reflection on choreography and performance.
It is inspired by the playfulness of sound art. We will listen to music, build collective sound installations, train our listening skills and share how we use or would like to use sound in our performance practices. The aim is to explore and question the status of sound in performance – something that exists between body, object and poetic/political speech.
In this workshop sound is considered in its materiality, as a texture, as a dancing body and not as a simple ornament for the dance. It is a simple political and poetic position: the practice of sound suggests the invisible and delicate relationship between the body and other (im)materialities, which in turn are influenced by images, choreographic sketches, videos, texts and people.
During the listening sessions we will hear field recordings, Greek prison music, love songs from Vietnam, Iranian doom, Syrian classics, Breton funeral chants, “Nouvelle Vague” cinema voice-overs, electro music from Uganda, and much more.
The practice will include the use of lo-fi material such as tapes, contact mics, cut ups, scratch, mash ups, location recording, destroyed electronic music and group singing. We will cross over to our dancing bodies.
This is not a technical workshop, but of course we will dirty our hands and sharpen our ears.
Bring objects if you wish (toys, sex toys, bells, gameboy, rocks, kettles). Bring pens and paper if you like. Anything costing less than 2 euros in a flea market (walkman, tape, dictaphone, keyboard). If you have a smartphone, bring it.
