BirdBecomeBird & Solo Acoustic Performance

Questioning the human-animal divide is a reoccuring theme in Suzanne Walsh’practice, which encompassed writing, music and visual art. Her vocal performance BirdBecomeBird, commits to the idea that music trecends species boundraries and reframes the bird song as a form of vocalisation and music making. Starting with a sequence of looping, improvised singing, and with musical phrases, the piece crescendoes to a cacophony of nonhumans voices , eventually filling the space with cries and cackles.

Artist van der Putten uses her voice as an instrument in order to physically, sonically and intuitively explore different environments. Solo Acoustic Performance is a demanding durational piece that challenges the limits of the singing body. About her work van der Putten says:

The sun is the motor that drives all of life, and as it rises in the East everywhere on earth, it has been and continues to be an orientation point. All living beings experience the cyclic movement of night transitioning to day, and of day returning to night, as an existential rhythm. Humans have mirrored this rhythm through the practice of walking in circles, embodying the movements of the stars and celestial vault. I have come to experience the breath, and implicitly the expired vocal sound, as the same kind of effortless cycle, without intention – thus the relation between the body, position, and cosmological elements such as the sunrise are central to my artistic practice. As the Dhrupad-singer, composer and dancer Amelia Cuni told me: “Find a (vocal) practise that becomes part of your daily life, because your practise is your life.” It is through this background that I wish to evolve my artistic activities into a spatial, contextual and sonic consciousness where geography, the embedded knowledge and history of a place, and acoustic resonance are reflected in the movement and architecture of the body, textile and voice sound.

This event is part of the exhibition Post-Opera at TENT.
Free admission.