For the next two months, I will be focusing on a research I started some years ago. If you are familiar with my choreographic work you might have noticed that I almost always use voice, sometimes it is in the way of a recorded text, other times it is someone talking through the microphone off stage, or a dancer singing on stage. In recent years my interest in the relationship between voice and movement has grown stronger. I am very happy that I was given a #TakeHeart residency with the Societaetstheater Dresden to go even deeper in my research.
Why voice?
Throughout my dance career I have had the fortune to collaborate with many artists from many different disciplines. Very often, I collaborate with music composers who play life in the performances. Having a life musician for a show is a very different experience that having the music playing from a CD. I find it more powerful, and of course more influential in my body. Many times I have to tell my self to ignore the music if I want to create some counter-point. Around the year 2016, I started collaborating with an artist, who has a lot of mastery of her voice, she would speak through a microphone and I would use her voice to move to it. Somehow I found her voice very moving, in the sense that it literally made me want to dance. Up until that moment I thought that only music was capable of influencing a dancers movement at a very deep level. I was wrong, as I continued experimenting with other peoples voices I realised that voice, can influence the movement of a dancer in a quite deep level as well. I then asked myself, if I would be able to move because of my own voice. Even though it is not at all unusual for me to use my voice or other dancers voices for my dance pieces, this time it was different. I knew that if I wanted to move using my voice, it had to come from deep inside of me. I must mention, for a ballet trained dancer to speak, is quite a big thing because during our profesional ballet education, from day one, we learn to shut up and dance, what we have to say, is not relevant, this is at least the reality I experienced. My curiosity, and my hunger to discover further brought me to free myself from the idea of the silent ballerina ingrained in me. Step by step, I have been discovering the power of ones own voice. It has been quite an emotional journey, very liberating in a way. Now I have reached a point where I would like to share my knowledge with other dancers, give workshops, create more choreographies using voice as a base. With the
#TakeHeart residency, one of my goals is to develop further a method of using voice to generate movement. I am so excited.
Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR
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