Homing
Homing was premiered at the Borealis festival, Bergen, on March the 11th, 2015.
Hearing a piece of music or a song can be a profoundly moving, even disturbing, experience, suddenly and dramatically altering our perception of the world around us. The ‘meaning’ of our surroundings undergoes a radical shift, so that we feel ourselves to be seeing everything from an entirely different perspective. These transformations, although not ‘real’ are not imagined either. Music has simply shed light on the gap between what and how we perceive, and filled it with a substance that creates completely new and unexpected connections between us and our environment. The tenuous quality of the social structures we inhabit is illuminated, and the relationships between the human beings around us, the actions they perform, the way they move and even the space they occupy seems to change. The paradigm shifts that can occur on hearing a single chord or instrumental timbre are no less significant for being purely subjective. But what if they were not limited to the realms of subjective experience? What if a single note could indeed cause structural and physical changes so that the intonation or grammar of the language we speak, the articulation of our bones and muscles as we move and the very shape and scale of the environment we inhabit were all slightly but nonetheless dramatically altered? What if a single sound acted like a rip in the fabric of reality, redefining the relationships between time and space, mind and body, sound and movement and people and place, to reveal a world weirdly familiar in its strangeness? Homing, a Neither Nor production commissioned by and created specially for the Borealis festival 2015, is a 20-minute music-theatre piece for voice, multiple movement performers and live and pre-recorded electronics, which explores this idea of sound as a medium for physical and social transformations – literal, magical, structural and mystical. Rather than simply creating a mood or accompanying the action, sound and music are the forces that drive each and every event, action and interaction in the world defined by the piece.
Participants:
Adam de la Cour (voice)
Claudia Klasicka (voice)
Alwynne Pritchard (concept, direction, choreography, sound and voice)
Thorolf Thuestad (live sound and electronics)
Anders Ohnstad (movement leader and ideas man)
Veronica Thorseth (movement consultant)
Movement performers:
Tolga Balci, Ingebjørg Aarhus Braseth, Heidi Fasmer, Sabine Henlin-Strømme, Marta Jacob, Randi Netland, Philipo Njaidi, Laima Nomeikaite, Ingrid Haugen Nonskar, Simon Optic, Maria Luiza Pietraszek, Tove Posselt, Therese Rosenlund, Antonio Sanchez, Nina Sagen Sandsbakk, Victoria Satchwell, Roar Sletteland, Urszula Sobol, Einar Stefánsson, Olav Tveitane and Eilert Tøsse.
Documentation video material, Karoline Finnema and Gunnbjörg Gunnarsdottir