Photo: Robbie Sweeney
These children singing in stone 2013
dance, felt blanket, low-fi sound objects
These children singing in stone is a sound and movement performance by and with Jassem Hindi. Not unlike synesthesia—the experience of cross sensory metaphors—this piece is a study of how a poem—the irrational, uncontrolled activity of our imagination surges in the midst of a formal approach to body and sound as overlapping three-dimensional objects in space. This approach relies on a self-aware production of movement and sound dependent on a conscious mental activity. This activity is discontinuous, due to the very nature of consciousness as a non-linear process. The production of sounds, movements and images placed in space is dependent on whether or not we, as performers, are aware of their production. The moment our attention slips, we switch, change, move, and erase what we were doing.
The work is an attempt to track and make visible this rhythm of discontinuous activity, as a back and forth between knowing and not knowing, doing and not doing. What we perceive consciously is dependent on our awareness of this slippage, of the disruption produced by the discontinuous nature of our consciousness. We attempt to translate this mental activity into aural and visible information, i.e. rate and rhythm with which to compose. The rhythm of our awareness makes our choreography. This conscious non-linear effort of production and the projection of three dimensional objects is at the mercy of disruptions which manifest themselves in the form of fragments of narration, inhabited shapes, poems, embryos of characters, much like in a Cy Twombly painting - where shapes and forms overlap with names of mythological characters and representations of concrete objects.
Concept Hana Erdman & Jassem Hindi
Dance Hana Erdman
Music Jassem Hindi
Art Direction & Design Michiel Keuper
Dramaturgical Assistant Ruairí Donovan
Supported by HZT, UdK (Universität der Künste Berlin) in the context of MA SODA, Ufer Studios.