Iris Colomb and Serena Braida describe their new project, SLANT, and its first event: Voiceworks, coming up on the 13th and 14th of September
The first thing we do when we lift the text off the page is to simply speak it; it is in our voice that poetry meets performance.
SLANT is an investigative platform which aims to explore, showcase and celebrate the diverse range of transdisciplinary poetic performance practices within and beyond the UK. Each of our events uses a collaborative curation model and takes on a different focus, with an emphasis on liveness and experimentation. In early March, after several months of preliminary work, SLANT and its quarterly programme were ready to launch. Voiceworks, our first event, was to take place on the 23rd of May 2020.
The launch of our platform was, however, closely followed by the global lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Besides its devastating worldwide consequences, and its impact on our respective personal and professional lives, this new context inevitably changed our project. As curators, we found ourselves facing urgent, complex and entirely unexpected questions. In a context where travelling overseas, sharing a space, breathing closely, all put people at risk, we had to negotiate the delivery of an event about voice, with an emphasis on liveness, and a view to building connections across borders. The ethical and artistic elements at stake couldn’t be more fraught. Questions of liveness, connectedness, and the physical dimension of voice have never felt more complex or relevant than they do now.
Like many, we didn’t anticipate that this crisis would last for as long as it has. When it became apparent that the UK’s lockdown would continue well into June, we decided to postpone Voiceworks to September. We hoped that it would be possible and safe to hold live events by then. However, as we got closer to our new date, it became apparent that we were unlikely to be able to hold the event with an audience. Even if we could do so, social distancing measures would keep the audience’s numbers very low. With liveness at the core of our project, we were reluctant to move Voiceworks online. However, we quickly realised that choosing to stream our event instead of postponing it further could allow us to continue supporting our performers at a time when it feels most important. In a country happy to reopen its pubs well before considering its theatres, we are proud to continue supporting our community by showcasing a brilliant selection of performances in a safe and accessible way. This is far more important to us than delivering the event in the exact form we initially intended to. We are very grateful for IKLECTIK’s support throughout this transition. Our performers have shown incredible flexibility and resilience in adapting and responding to the constraints of this new online format. We are incredibly excited to share their work with our audience.
Voiceworks will include a new performance piece by Co-Curator Serena Braida, who will be joined by two headliners and three brilliant performers (including a duo) we had the pleasure of discovering through our open call. Their works will explore the ways — embodied, aesthetical, political — in which sound and meaning can be negotiated between speaker, space and listener; through a range of poetic experiences in which languages collide; words spill into sound; speech is layered, manipulated, deconstructed; and listening becomes an immersive collaborative practice.
Kinga Tóth and Emma Bennett, respectively based in Hungary and Ireland, have both developed interdisciplinary practices involving expansive poetic and performative approaches to voice. Kinga’s performances are multisensory poetic experiences in which strong vocal elements combine incantatory melodies with noise, punk and technological distortions. She explores power-grabbing and different scales of hierarchy through visceral, embodied and mesmerising voicings which slip and tear between Hungarian, German and English. Emma Bennett explores, questions, and subverts performative speech, brilliantly deconstructing the role of the speaker through playful and moving vocal performances. Her process-led pieces are built in dialogue with research into joking, theatrical representation, and the aesthetics of labour.
Together with these two performers, whose work we discovered through the experimental poetry community, we also have the privilege of showcasing performance pieces by composer and performer Richard McReynolds, multimedia artist and performer Anamaria Burduli and the experimental duo L M B (Lou Marian Barnell and Lisa Mary Busby). Their work with voice and text include a rich variety of approaches drawing from various practices including sound poetry, theatre and experimental music.
Richard McReynolds will present a dada-inspired sound poem combining raw uses of voice with technological manipulation controlled by physical gestures. Anamaria Burduli will deliver an explosive, polyphonic and playful exploration of meaning in speech by intertwining the prosodies of Georgian and English. Lou Barnell and Lisa Busby will share work from their collaborative project L M B: a dreamlike, affective practical exploration of listening as a whole-body phenomenon. Their contribution to Voiceworks will involve a video work and corollary “dialogue” reflecting on the possibilities of a new ‘distanced intimacy’ as a way to maintain and sustain collaborative work despite and through the challenges of our current context.
We see the new form of Voiceworks as a chance for us to expand our vision of what sharing means, and how liveness can be re-framed and re-imagined when it is stripped of the physical ‘here’ and ‘now’.
We hope to see you all (online) on the 13th & 14th of September, 8pm, at IKLECTIK off-site.
