The new series of performances by Liquid Loft puts the act of speaking at the center of the choreographic focus and reflects the experience of contemporary urban life, its polyphony and multilingualism. The starting point are voice recordings based on personal conversations with various individuals in different regions of Europe, focusing mainly on regional and minority languages. In rehearsals, these voice recordings become connected to the body language of the dancers. A spoken phrase is translated into movement sequences, based on all its attributes such as tone, sound, dynamics or intonation.

Foreign Tongues deals with the dilemma of lived translation, which requires us to tolerate that which divides us and find a common space therein. By means of contradictions and surprising correlations it demonstrates, among other things, how much can be comprehended, even when you have not yet understood anything. The Foreign Tongues Projects are based on slangs and regional languages from all over Europe and change their format and characteristics according to location and architecture, each time integrating the dialects and jargons specific to the place of performance.

Currently Foreign Tongues expands into public space in different cities of Europe within the framework of an IN SITU pilot project.

Church of Ignorance

Site-Specific Performance

Church of Ignorance uses monumental or sacral buildings as a living container for an ever growing “Library of Babylon”. Church of Ignorance is the utopian promise to escape the disaster, to, nonetheless, ultimately resolve the contradictions of the modern world one day and deal with its complexity together.

Liquid Loft is recording languages, collecting them and creating a kind of reservoir of voices. A sacred space temporarily serves us as storage for slangs, dialects and minority languages from all over Europe; becomes a performative, Babylonian Library, accessible to the audience.

What is needed to understand the almost forgotten languages and unfamiliar dialects of this library, is the bodily realisation in space. At first the body is only “corpus” – reservoir for a multitude of voice recordings. The body, so goes the saying, doesn’t lie. And here it serves as our sensorium and tool of transcription. The performers, for the most part, do not understand the languages they are writing onto their body, but offer possible translations based on their phonetics. They transcribe the unfamiliar words into movement, not without leaving room for own interpretations, for stories as well as for phantasies of the audience. Only through these interpretations does the din of voices become choreography and the cacophony of language turn into a musical piece. From apparent glossolalia evolves, over the course of the performance, a Spoken Word Symphony.

Some context to the Foreign Tongues Projects

The biblical story of the Tower of Babylon, set in primordial times, develops as an urban dystopia; the catastrophe of its collapse, a failure of complex systems caused by the laws of entropy. Likewise, Babylon stands for the experience of exile, the involuntary displacement that brought the refugees to the center of an urban civilization, at the very moment where, in the history of religion, monotheism came about, with its universalist ethics that leads beyond the confines of the clan, the tribe, the nation or the religious community.

Before we speak we already bring an expansive epos of untold stories into the game: the imprint of the family, stereotypes of gender or the instances of cultural socialization, that form our vision, thinking and speaking. The regional idiosyncrasies are included in this as much as the claim that, in a globalized context we need to speak a world-language, despite the price of impoverishment and simplification. Through this the question for an artistic praxis which knows to decode these latent messages is raised. The choreographic intervention is the attempt to make our bodies talk while they speak.

The “noise” of bodies, the sonic image of their movements and affectations in public spaces, within the sound of cities; their strangeness, their multilingualism, and their local features – all that is filtered out by the highly evolved system of language processing, yet nonetheless a condition for its success.

In Foreign Tongues, Babylon becomes the lived translation problem requiring to tolerate that which divides and yet find the common therein. It is the society of the great migration, where those owners of passports, whose papers are privileged by the coincidence of birthplace to hold the highest esteem in the world, are free to seek their luck just about everywhere. While those less lucky are sometimes met with lethal obstacles, when trying to save their lives elsewhere. Or, less dramatic, find economic sustainability.

CREDITS

Foreign Tongues
site specific performances 

Dance, Choreography: Luke Baio, Stephanie Cumming, Dong Uk Kim, Katharina Meves, Dante Murillo, Arttu Palmio, Karin Pauer, Hannah Timbrell.
Artistic Direction, Choreography: Chris Haring
Composition, Sound: Andreas Berger
Light Design, Scenography: Thomas Jelinek
Stage Management: Roman Harrer
Photo and Video: Michael Loizenbauer
Production Assistance: Christina Helena Romirer
Production Management: Marlies Pucher

Co-produced by: Atelier 231 (FR), Festival di Terni (IT), Freedom Festival (UK), La Strada Graz (AT), Lieux publics (FR), Norfolk & Norwich Festival (UK), Østfold kulturutvikling (NO), Oerol Festival (NL), Theater op de Markt (BE) and UZ Arts (UK).

Research-Partner: CDC Toulouse (FR), Dublin Dance Festival (IR), Tanz.Ist Dornbirn (AT), Opera Estate Festival Bassano del Grappa (I), DansBrabant (NL).

Foreign Tongues, an IN SITU Pilot project, has received a creation aid under the ACT project, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Liquid Loft is supported by: MA7 Kulturabteilung der Stadt Wien (Cultural Department of the City of Vienna) and BKA Bundeskanzleramt Kunst & Kultur (Austrian Federal Chancellery Arts & Culture)

Foreign Tongues (Toulouse)
stage performance 

Dance, Choreography: Luke Baio, Stephanie Cumming, Katharina Meves,
Arttu Palmio, Karin Pauer Artistic Direction, Choreography: Chris Haring
Composition, Sound: Andreas Berger
Light Design, Scenography: Thomas Jelinek
Costumes: Julia Cepp
Theory, Text: Stefan Grissemann
Stage Management: Roman Harrer
Photo and Video Documentation: Michael Loizenbauer
Distribution: Line Rousseau & Marion Gauvent, A PROPIC
Production Assistance: Christina Helena Romirer
Production Management: Marlies Pucher

A co-production of Tanzquartier Wien, CDC Toulouse & Liquid Loft

A very special thanks to all collaborators for voice recordings:
Aika Souleimenova, Brigitta Machtinger, Camille Chopin, Ditta Miranda Jasfi,
Emmerich Gärtner Horvath, Isabelle Piquemal, Josef Schmidt, Julie Loubere,
Luce Vergneaux, Lou Dávi, Mathieu Fauvé, Miaai Sorin-Giurgin, Martin
Horvath, Michael Machtinger, Mijiti Mukadasi, Paul Horvath, Romain Brunel,
Yoann Ducassou, Yuko Yamada, Nicki, Kim, Diana, Christa und Annemarie
Haring.

Thanks to: Paul-Eric Labrosse, Walter Heun, Maison de l’Occitanie Toulouse, Anna Maria Nowak, Fritz Ostermayer, Guy Cools, Roderich Madl, Uwe Mattheiß

Duration: 65min.

Première: 16 February 2017 , Tanzquartier Wien, Halle G, AT

Liquid Loft is supported by: MA7 Kulturabteilung der Stadt Wien (Cultural Department of the City of Vienna) and BKA Bundeskanzleramt Kunst & Kultur (Austrian Federal Chancellery Arts & Culture.

AGENDA
under construction

2018/19

15-11-18	FOREIGN TONGUES	LEEUWARDEN	EXPLORE NORTH FESTIVAL	NL
16-11-18	FOREIGN TONGUES	LEEUWARDEN	EXPLORE NORTH FESTIVAL	NL
17-11-18	FOREIGN TONGUES	LEEUWARDEN	EXPLORE NORTH FESTIVAL	NL
14-02-19	FOREIGN TONGUES	WIEN	TANZQUARTIER	AT
15-02-19	FOREIGN TONGUES	WIEN	TANZQUARTIER	AT
16-02-19	FOREIGN TONGUES	WIEN	TANZQUARTIER	AT

 

2017

26 October 2017 – 03 November 2017 Residency / Dans Brabant, Tilburg, NL

16 September 2017  – Parcours de la Maison ehem Gudrunkino

15 September 2017  – Parcours de la Maison ehem Gudrunkino

09 September 2017  (Showing) Travellings Festival, Marseille

03 September 2017 – 09 September 2017 Residency / Travellings Festival, Marseille

19 May 2017  (Toulouse) Figurentheaterfestival Nürnberg, DE

18 February 2017  (Toulouse) Tanzquartier Wien, Halle G, AT

17 February 2017  (Toulouse) Tanzquartier Wien, Halle G, AT

16 February 2017  (Toulouse) Premiere / Tanzquartier Wien, Halle G, AT