I collaborated with Danish composer and inventor Lars Kynde (https://www.larskynde.dk), at Inter Arts Center (www.iac.lu.se) in Malmö, Sweden, in November 2020. We explored our shared interest in integration of sound and movement, experimenting with overtone sound modulated by bodily movements. 

We focused on space as an organic instrument (metaphorically speaking) that generates sound and movement. We transformed the space into a large mechanical acoustic instrument made of strings, wood, water, magnets, and steel, which I explored in relation to my own body by dancing inside it, altering the tones with my bodily movement. In one sense, my movements were determined by the shape of the instrument setup, as specific gestures were needed in order to generate its sound. In another sense, the music composition was composed and played by my dance within this frame.

Songs of Absence is a segment of my performance series No Man’s Land, which I have been developing for the last few years. It is based on the character Lavinia in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Lavinia is the daughter of Titus, a general in the Roman army who is engaged in a cycle of revenge. I focus on the scene in which Lavinia is raped, and is then hung from a dead tree trunk. Her tongue and hands were cut off by the assailants after she was raped. The violence is not visualized nor indicated; it is indirectly implied through her response to it through silence. How I can embody her silent response to such horrific violence is my main question. 

I met Simon Whetham during my residency at YATOOi in 2016. Since then, we have collaborated several times. He uses the environmental structure of the space to create sound. We made this sound art performance during his artist residency at Palbok Factory of Contemporary Art in 2019. 

We mostly used environmental sound, employing his audio methods and equipment to capture often unnoticed and obscured sonic phenomena. We made special use of walls to echo, reflect, muffle, and reverberate my voice and sounds from the objects inside and outside the walls. It was windy during our performance, so we used the wind to make or alter sounds. 

Interdisciplinary improvised performance, part of Freaktoni Witchy Weekend of Katie Duck's Intensive Improvisation Workshop, Direction & performance with others: 

I used the title “Tío Jose” as a generic term for the nameless men that are sacrificed to the ideologies of governing elites. I was initially inspired by a traditional Korean dance intended for the spirits of dead souls that roam around, trapped in this human world, unable to travel to the other world. The dance attempts to console the spirits so they can travel to that other world. I wanted to create my own modern version, after I learned about a grave next to Centro Negra. Tío Jose died in 1937, one year after the Spanish Civil War. The performance was dedicated to Tío Jose, whom I regarded as a symbolic reference to all people who suffered and died during the Civil War, or all wars. I danced for the spirit of Tío Jose as if I were visiting different places in Blanca, accompanied by soundscapes composed partly of sounds sampled from those same places, and going through his memories, which I imagined. In this way, his spirit could be consoled and travel to the other world. 

Me Entiendes was a solo performance in which I incorporated sound art and dance, creating both sounds and movements during the performance. Its title, which means “Do you understand me?” in English, is an idiosyncratic verbal expression of a local Arab singer with whom I initiated an unfinished collaboration. Although he did not participate in Me Entiendes, the phrase encapsulated our incomplete work. 

”Me entiendes” is commonly used as a conversation filler, like “like” in America or “you know what I mean” in England. They do not mean anything, but merely dill the silence between phrases. I used it to carry its literal meaning, to indicate the insecurity of immigrants in a new world that is not willing to understand strangers. I used props that were related to cleaning, the job that is mostly taken over by poor immigrants. I also used a white screen and pebbles to suggest both the inability to communicate and nostalgia. 

This performance was my first attempt to use sounds generated by my dance movement as components of my performance. In conventional performance, sound and movement exist as separate layers. Often, the sounds created naturally by the performers, such as breathing, stepping, and falling, are filtered out by the audience’s ears, and the performers do not regard their own natural sounds as part of the work. I tried to remove this separation while exploring various forms of performance. I am not a sound artist, but a performance artist exploring sound art to synergize with and contextualize my movement. 

We picked a deep underground space at a water treatment station, which ceased operations in 2011, after 40 years of serving the residents of Seoul in South Korea. The station was ready to be reconstructed into a space for producing street art as part of the Seoul Street Art Center, which eventually opened in 2015. 

We chose the site because its massive size seemed to make people forget the world outside. The dark internal space was filled with subtle sounds of the old machines inside, which echoed the fragile sounds from outside, penetrating through multiple layers. The space created another world that was inhabited by those old machines chocking out their last breaths. It was bounded by decayed grey walls, punctuated by bits and pieces of unidentifiable industrial objects, and stroked by the shafts of sunlight that briefly sneaked in through the narrow windows at the top in the afternoon. It was surreal, remote from the world outside. The space felt like it was a living organism with all of its internal organs groaning and murmuring, as if it had known it would soon be demolished and turned into dust. 

Since it was fully alive as it was, the space did not need much of our interruption. Being in the space was an experience on its own. A bit of lingering and titillating was enough to awaken the latent life from sleep. We tried to find the optimum point at which we could awaken it without disturbing it. 

The performance employed installations of objects near a big, old tree outdoors, around the theme of the sacred tree of the village.

The artwork was a combination of movement performance and soundscape, with an installation made of materials gleaned from the street. Xin Chen created the installation, and the performance was directed and performed by Xin Chen and me. 

White noise from the radio implies the constant interruption of a social system, which shapes our lives, through the conceptual grids of time and space, into chains of meaningless instants to which the sleeper reacts spasmodically. 

We cannot see the sleeper’s nightmare. The sleeper is in her nightmare and absent from this reality. But we can clearly see that she is trying to wake up. While her struggle is vivid, we can only witness her falling back into the lonely place of her nightmare. 

“Nightmare” is my act of silence that fights against the instrumental, commodified languages of authoritarianism. This silence is the lonely place behind the glass wall of language. It tries to speak, and yet its language remains silent behind that wall. It can only be seen in its silence.