A new group called IUooUI is going to give its first series of full performances. Most of us know each other for many years now and share a deep passion for overtone singing, throat singing and improvising with voices and instruments, as well as work on the body-mind relationship. We decided to take it a step further and create surprising performances based on all those amazing sessions we had during workshops throughout the years. We all have dreams and desires to bring the music in our heads alive, for others to hear. This is a challenge. We leave the intimate comfort zone of a workshop space. We are ready to confront an audience of curious listeners in unusual settings, and to envelop them with our resonances, overtones, mantras, syllables, shrieks, assisted by drums, Jew’s Harps, shruti boxes and more.
The name UIooUI stands for the mantra-and sutra-like phrases that we often use, inspired by the okyo of Michael Vetter (1943-2013). Michael transformed these traditional Japanese sutras to expand his own musical language, and this has become part of my own language now. IuooUI also stands for:
Of course, the syllables i-u-o-o-u-i make a small overtone piece in themselves.
The name was proposed by our in-house poet, Amang, whose Chinese name is Yü, which is the last part of IUooUI when it is pronounced as a three-character Mandarin syllabe, yiwoyu.
Our in-house designer JiJi Liu created the logo for us.
The name TWEAKS refers to the process of tweaking, adjusting, making things better by smaller or sometimes bigger changes. It is my hope that next week we can really tweak all the musical elements so that they keep on growing, changing and move towards a more refined shape. This week, at least, some of us were still busy tweaking, like JiJi and Sky, who came up with this after the dress rehearsal:
It has been inspiring to see how busy all members got in recent months to prepare for this first complete performance. They have been working diligently on their sounds and pieces, of which more than half is composed by themselves in smaller units. They took care of sound and light, finding equipment and personnel to handle it, costumes …
Earlier this year we have done some smaller performance, to warm up, and as teasers for our bigger program.
DATES and TIMES
Sunday August 21 – 19:30
Wednesday August 24 – 19:30
Friday August 26 – 15:00 and 19:30
Sunday August 28 – 19:30
The performances will be held at VENUE, on its 5F space, No. 10, Lane 107, Linsen North Road. This is a bustling area and if you have the time, you can have diner before at a nice Japanese restaurant, Umeko, right next door to VENUE (no. 8)!
Taipei Dance Circle (光環舞集) continues to bring their piece Lending Ear to Dance, Eye to Sound to theatres across Taiwan. I will join them in one of the three choreographies. Read more about our collaboration and co-founder Liu Shaolu in a previous post here.
Program: “Lending Ear To Dance, Eye To Sound” 聽舞觀聲
Dancers:
姚凱蕾 Yao Kai-Lei
蕭靈鳳 Siew Lin-Fong
王憲彬 Wang Hsien-Pin
陳英豪 Chen Ying-Hao
Tour to:
Taidong
Saturday 3/5 19:30 Performance Hall of Taitung County Government Bureau of Cultural Affair
Taichung
Wednesday 3/23 19:00 Providence University Zhi Shan Hall Stadium
Tamshui (Saturday May 1, to be confirmed)
Hsinchu
Saturday 5/27 19:30 Performance Hall of Cultural Bureau, Hsinchu County
Sanxia
Saturday 6/18 19:30 Performing hall of Xinzhuang Culture and Arts Center
Yingge
Friday 9/23 13:00
Yingge Technical High School
Read a Taipei Times article about the program here.
This week Taipei Dance Circle (光環舞集) presents a new evening program with three new pieces, a little over a year after founder Liou Shaw-lu (劉紹爐) passed away. I got to know Shaw-lu over a decade ago when I was teaching at the Taipei National University of the Arts in Kuandu, not far from Taipei Dance Circle’s base in Bali, on the opposite side of the Tamshui river. These classes were organised by Prof. Chung Mingder, then dean of the Department of Theatre, and attracted also people from outside the university (artists outside the school like Shaw-lu, or nuns from the Huayen monastery). To anyone who knew Shaw-lu it is needless to say I immediately I liked him: he was such a likable, positive soul, constantly curious, constantly creative, or ‘creating’ to say it more actively. When I see him with my mind’s eye, I see him moving: moving his hands, his head, his torso, expressing whatever he wanted to say or responding to whatever he saw with his full body. And of course, he did not just move: he always moved beautifully, elegantly, from somewhere deep inside himself, and at the same time summoning forces much bigger than himself. He absorbed the environment and reflected it back with his body, with his mind and also with his voice. He was very passionate about learning to use the voice in new ways. He felt and saw from the perspective of dance, what I felt and saw from the perspective of music: the possibility of integrating sound and body.
Shaw-La, taimu, Mark some 10 years ago
He followed my classes, but of course I learned as much from him. His presence as a dancer helped me feel comfortable to do all kinds of unusual physical exercises in order to experiment with the sound of the voice. I remember we rehearsed and performed a piece when the semester of the ‘official’ theatre class (I think it was called Overtone singing and Meditation) was about to finish. All students presented their own work, and I did a piece with Shaw-lu. It was a delight to improvise with him, even though I felt quite clumsy doing the physical work next to someone so flexible, so much in a constant, physical flow. Shao-lu and I also presented something together at Huayen Monastery, who at that time were interested in the integration of overtones in body-mind practices.
It was a great honour for me to receive the invitation from Taipei Dance Circle’s co-founder Maura Yang earlier this year, to collaborate with the dancers now that co-founder and choreographer Shaw-lu passed away. A challenge, too, since we all started work on integrating movement and sound: the piece we created, involves all four dancers and myself on stage, doing both sound and movement. After throwing ourselves into each other territories (they singing/sounding, me dancing/moving), we found it necessary to take a step back and stay more within our own disciplines. It is a long and difficult, but rewarding process to move out of your comfort-zone: I think we all shifted into this new territory, and we are searching still for the right mode. Tonight is the première, but the last adjustments are still being made.
In Last year’s dance projects I did with Horse (驫舞劇場: Play Dead / 裝死) and then with Yeh Ming Hwa (葉名樺 : Nordic / 寂靜敲門), I was first purely a musician, onstage but separated from the dancers, then a musician/actor sharing the space with the dancers Will that turn out to be the better option? I hope both are possible, though there is no doubt that these three pieces are a world apart.
Yeh Ming-Hwa’s piece Nordic (Photo Lee Hsin-Che)
In order to commemorate Shaw-lu, we are singing a Hakka song. As Yao Kai-Lei (姚凱蕾) one of the dancers of TDC, explained today for Hakka TV, Shaw-lu loved old Hakka mountain songs, which used to be sung not as concert pieces, but in daily life by the tea planters in the old days. Hakka people just sang them while working, sometimes over long distances in the mountains, improvising phrases (and no doubt, also texts). I am not sure Shaw-lu actually heard that when he was young …. But taimu (Prof Chung) encouraged us to sing old songs in this project, and since many of the songs that we tried would not work for the group as a whole, it was natural to chose Lao Shan Ge (old mountain song).
About the other vocal parts, I wrote this for the program booklet:
In Western art music and dance, sound and movements are rigorously controlled by what they present and what is taught, from one generation to the next. Not only that; it is also controlled by what is not presented, by that which is controlled by expelling it. Musicians are basically taught to play their instrument from a still position, and not to make unwanted movements. The accepted movements that we see from a pianist or violinist are highly stylised and may be likened to a kind of choreography. Many musicians and dancers alike were taught not only to control their movements but also to suppress the sounds that might accompany those movements. The presence of unwanted sounds almost amounts to a taboo, both for dancers and for musicians. There may be valid practical and also esthetic reasons for it, but are we not robbing dancers or musicians of some of their most powerful means of expression when we subjugate the performing body to these unwritten rules? What do we find, for example, when we allow the performing body to freely make noise, make sound, make music, and when we allow the musicking body to move or to dance?
These questions are not new, and have been explored from various angles in the past decades, not in the least in many of the late works of Liu Shao Lu, who was deeply committed to integrating sound with movement. Yet unwritten performance rules run deep in the veins of artists, be they musicians or dancers. It is hard for the dancer to work the muscles of the vocal cords and mouth just like she is used to work the muscles of torso, arms and legs. And it is hard for the musician to really see himself moving, and to move freely beyond the need of musical gestures. Trained in one art form, we are partly blinded by the aesthetic language we are most familiar with. How can we re-integrate these two seemingly different languages of dance and music with each other? Can we find some more or less natural meeting points? Is it even possible, perhaps, to really ‘forget’ our own disciplines and create something from a common bodily language, becoming sound and movement at the same time?
Program: “Lending Ear To Dance, Eye To Sound” 聽舞觀聲
Dancers:
姚凱蕾 Yao Kai-Lei
蕭靈鳳 SIEW LIN-FONG
王憲彬 WANG HSIEN-PIN
陳英豪 Chen Ying-Hao
Five performances tonight until Sunday (Sept 10-13) in Experimental Theatre 實驗劇場 / National Theatre 國家戲劇院
After that: tour to HsinChu (October 16), New Taipei City (November 8), Taoyuan City (November 14) Pingtung City (November 21), Hsinchu county (November 28).
Read a Taipei Times about the new program article here.
Since autumn of 2013 Shih-Yang Lee, Yu-Long Chen and myself are working with the experimental dancers of Horse. The performance will be showing in the National Theater in Taipei beginning of May, together with another show by Shu-Yi and Dancers. There was a press event last week, and I just heard the first performance is already sold out, and there are less than 90 tickets for the second one. So don’t wait to order your tickets if you want to see something special!
A gong resounds on the groundfloor of a spa. Through the mezzanine situated at the spa’s glass façade, its sound waves travel to the basement, where a voice answers the gong. A multi-level dialogue begins, in more than one sense of the word. Instruments and voices, audience and performers mingle in a unique sound-space-event that tests the limits of music, mind & body.
Festival Transverbal is dedicated to the memory and legacy of the German multi-medial artist Michael Vetter, who passed away, aged 70, on December 7, 2013. It bridges an ongoing search for sound’s soothing inner secrets with its more expressive post-modern/avant-garde forms.
Expect voices, singing bowls, sheng (mouth organ), a gong, performers moving through the space, an immersive 60-minute sonic surrounding. Talk to or play with the musicians afterwards!
Through this Festival we keep alive the spirit and works of Michael Vetter, who inspired many musicians, artists, and other individuals along his extremely versatile and moving career in Europe and Asia. Michael Vetter had an incredible output of art works (starting at age 5); compositions, LPs/CDs; tours and performances; and educational methods for (experimental) flute, voice and instruments, among many other things. His musical career spanned the period from his late school years (early 1960s) until the months before his death (september 2013), when he worked on pieces by Karlheinz Stockhausen that many musicians have played and performed piecemeal, while none really gave them a try in their entirety. Thus, shortly after his death, Natascha Nikeprelevic, Vetter’s foremost successor, and Stockhausen Verlag worked on the publication ofExpo, one of Stockhausen’s scores with pluses and minuses (+ -) as guiding points. Vetter recorded it with Nikeprelevic and FX Randomiz 8 weeks before he passed away. (The CD appeared in May of this year, listen here).
Michael Vetter’s visit to Taiwan, together with Natascha Nikprelevic, left a great impression on those who had the chance to see/hear them or work with them, during their residency at the Taipei National University of Arts, where Chung Minder from the Theatre Department invited them.
Michael Vetter always straddled the paths outside clear-cut styles, usually combining elements from here and there, and most of all relying on his own experimental genius to create fresh insights and sounds at every moment. His long-time affiliation with zen in Japan and outspoken zen themes in the 1980s aliened him from some of his former avant-garde colleagues, who shied away from (or were not interested in) anything to do with Eastern “spirituality”. However, looking back on his life in its entirety, it is clear that Vetter was dedicated to creative imagination and disciplined, daily musical and artistic rituals, above anything else. For Vetter, the world itself was constantly exploding with creation, unfolding, coming-into-existence, into a myriad forms, colours, sounds. He observed this world with intelligence, humor, commitment and compassion. His love and dedication to the arts and existence (‘Dasein’) as a whole was the starting point for his creative response to them. Or rather, it seemed he was able to let creative forces take their course through him, as a critical, subtle moderator.
Michael Vetter making Indian ink drawings, Academia Caparaia, Italy, 2009
It is in this spirit of capturing the uniqueness of every meeting (between performers, with a certain space and with a certain audience, at a given time) that we want to inaugurate a Festival which we hope to repeat in following years.
We prepared this Transverbal Festival in collaboration with Canjune Spa and Nicole’s Creative agency. It will be held on Sunday, November 16 at Canjune Spa. There are two identical concerts, you can join us either in the afternoon (3 PM) or in the evening (7 PM). The participants are Hans de Back, Lu Chi-Chung and Lee Wei-Lin, Li Li-Chin and Mark van Tongeren, and probably a few more musical assistants.
For more information and tickets, please follow this link to accupass.
Limited number of tickets!
Please also note that there will be a limited number of seats in the space, and limited storage space for your bags. Do not bring your own food/drinks.
We believe this concert will be less suitable for young children.
Voice Yoga consists of a series of exercises that gives pride of place to the voice as a central, creative force in our lifes. Our existence depends in important ways on our speaking, listening, sounding and singing abilities. The class promotes awareness of the many roles of the voice in our daily lives. It expands our creative vocabulary, without necessarily talking about music, the singing voice or any musical style. The point is not so much to learn any specific new technique: we play with the voice in a lot of different ways and listen with fresh ears to the hidden potential of our voices.
In Voice Yoga, sound, silence and resonance become a mirror for the self. The sounds produced by ourselves, allows us to ‘see’ ourselves more clearly, to hear what’s living deep inside us. In ever-growing cycles of creating and perceiving we learn about music and sound, about ourselves and about the environment.
Structure of the classes
We usually start with silence, breath and body movements to turn away from our busy mind into the body and to the sensations we actually experience. We let the voice come out of a natural breath flow. We listen to and follow its natural resonances. We do not try to sing in an artful way, but to experience how body-mind-voice are intimately connected, and how voice and resonance can serve as a bridge to overcome the dualistic notion of body <> mind. From then on, all kinds of styles and genres of vocalising and musicking may happen, some structured, some wild, some giving insight in your voice, some therapeutic. Exercises are based on yoga, musical and theatrical techniques, vipassana meditation and our innate love to play like children.
The idea behind Voice Yoga is comparable to yoga and tai-chi: the effect of the exercises is gradual. We believe that only with repeated classes you can really learn to connect the energies of voice & sound with the whole of your body and mind. You slowly become more and more familiar with your voice and its powers; you will begin to hear and feel things you did not hear and feel before. That’s why we suggest you to sign up for four classes a time after your trial class.
The teacher
Voice Yoga is designed and taught by Mark van Tongeren, who brings with him 25 years of experience in working with sound, music and theatre and many different cultures.
For whom
For those seeking to enrich their voices, let off steam and unlock their hidden creative potential. For singers and those who are afraid to sing. For actors, musicians and other artists and professionals who work with sound. Perhaps more than anyone else, people who want to experience and learn about the therapeutical effects of sound seem to benefit from Voice Yoga. The human voice is a tool that assists human beings to produce a mirror-like reflection of the world around them in their minds. By gaining a deeper understanding and experience of the mechanisms of making sounds, words and music, and of listening, we gradually deepen the connections within ourselves (our body-minds) and with others and the world around us.
Prices
Every class lasts two hours. The price is 400 NT$ for a single class, and 1500 NT$ for four classes (375 NT$ per class). You do not have to attend four classes in a row; we’ll just tick off your presence four times and then you can sign up again for four times. Students and others with limited financial resources can get a reduced price: just send a message.
How to register
Feel free to join the Voice Yoga class any time. It is best to send a message every time you want to come, then we prepare a place for you. Write to mark at fusica dot nl or send a text-message to 09 10 48 27 49.
Place
Canjune Training Centre, 4th Floor, number 3 , Lane 151, Fuxing South Road, Section 2, (this is about 20 meters from the corner of FuXing South Road, go up the stairs to the hairdresser and take the elevator to 4F; if you’re early the streetdoor may be closed). Nearest MRT: Technology Building (10 min. walk). Telephone training centre: 02 – 27 00 72 91.
Tuvan folksong / extended vocal techniques / throat singing-diva Sainkho performs once again in Taiwan. Sainkho was born in Soviet-era Tuva, in a Siberian outpost within eyesight of Mongolia. She developed more than average singing skills and during the late 1980s she took advantage of the political/cultural reformations (perestroika) to set out on an innovative career that soon put her in the international ranks of outstanding, progressive singers.
She moved to Austria in 1994, and was begged to come back to Tuva by president Sholban Kara-ool this month, while she visited Tuva.
She established her name with sweat and original interpretations of Tuvan songs in the early 1990s and experimental work. Nowadays much of Sainkho’s output is ecclectic, avant-garde, with an electrifying, ear-catching aura to it. She is an amazingly busy and energetic performer, who constantly travels the world to collaborate with ever new musicians, pouring out CD after CD, and re-inventing herself every year.
Exactly ten years ago, she gave a memorable concert in Zhongshan Hall, and a throat singing workshop in TNUA (reported in Chung Mingder’s book OM. Overtone singing as meditation). At that time she brought with her German Popov, an old friend of mine from Amsterdam (born in the Ukraine), and singer/guitarist Caspar David Sacker from Austria. I am happy to see that this time she works with a local musician (and again a friend of mine), the Taipei-based pianist Lee Shih-Yang. Also taking part will be Dickson Dee, a Hong Kong sound artist.
This concert is highly recommended for all people interested in Tuvan/Mongolian music, throat singing and new vocal techniques. When I spread this message through my Fusica newsletter there were still tickets left. Now there aren’t… But I had reserved a bunch of tickets for the students of my R E S O N A N C E course through Lee Shih-Yang. If you are interested respond quick (reply below) and I can see if he still has a ticket for the October 5 show for you . Tickets are 500 NT$ minus a little discount. Hope to see you there!
2014新點子樂展Innovation Series – 人聲風景「即興篇」
SoundScape-Improvisation Across the Horizon
Tonight I am going to do a short ‘breath performance’ at a special edition of Red Room, the monthly event in the Aveda kitchen hosted by Chu Ping and Roma and Manav Mehta. The breath is a central focus of my performances, sometimes in the foreground, always in the background. And I thought the news of the passing away, on August 20 2014, of Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja (or simply ‘B.K.S.’) Iyengar would be a fitting occasion to start and end the performance using special breathing techniques.
Iyengar was instrumental in bringing yoga to the west in the 1950s and began to adapt it to the different lifestyles of American practitioners. Though he received criticism for changing the one-to-one transmission to a group practice and using physical tools such as woodblocks and straps, there can be no doubt that his methods have been a great success and have benefited hundreds of thousands of people in the West. And one can certainly not say that he himself was not fully part of the tradition, as an early video of him with is his own guru Tirumalai Krishnamacharya demonstrated. This is the full version of the 1938 film, but you can find several shorter sequences on Youtube.
It was Tirumalai Krishnamacharya who traveled India to promote hatha yoga and its associated practices and philosophies and thus began the revival which then crossed over to other parts of the world.
Tirumalai Krishnamacharya shortly before his death in 1988, aged 100
One may certainly include me in the league of teachers who misinterpret yoga or use its name for purposes other than its original intentions. But I do not agree with those criticasters who deplore what Iyengar has done. I think yoga is a fantastic practice and profound philosophy that can benefit people in many different ways. Indians should be proud to see so many people around the world doing some form of yoga or yoga-derived practices today.
I am very often in favor of traditional practices above modern forms myself, for example when it comes to indigenous music. But the modernisation and adaption process is irreversible and in the case of yoga, even those not-so-dedicated practitioners like myself learn things and solve problems that you can not learn otherwise (I struggled with lower-backache for many years; physiotherapies did not solve it but hatha yoga did).
So to thank and honour Mr. Iyengar I will begin tonight’s performance with a very extended, silent inhale and finish with a very extended, resounding exhale.
In this class we use the voice in its immense richness, not only as a musical instrument, but as our primary tool to communicate and exist through/with/for/from sound. In Voice Yoga, sound, silence and resonance become a mirror for the self. The sounds produced by ourselves, allows us to ‘see’ ourselves more clearly, to hear what’s living deep inside us. In ever-growing cycles of creating and perceiving we learn about music and sound, about ourselves and about the environment. A ‘quintessence of science, sound and self’ as I called it in my book Overtone Singing.
DATES AND TIME FOR 2014
EVERY THURSDAY, 10-12 AM
[table colwidth=”100″ ]
JANUARY,9/ 16/ 23/ 28
FEBRUARY,13/ 20/ 27
MARCH,6/ 13/ 27
APRIL,3/ 10/ 17/ 24
MAY,1/ 8/ 15/ 22/ 29
JUNE,5/ 12/ 19
AUGUST,21/ 28
SEPTEMBER,4/ 11/ 18/ 25
OCTOBER,2/ 9/ 16/ 23/ 30
NOVEMBER,6/ 13/ 27 [no class on November 20]
DECEMBER,4/ 11/ 18/ 25
[/table]
PLACE
Canjune Training Centre, 4th Floor, number 3 , Lane 151, Fuxing South Road, Section 2, (this is about 20 meters from the corner of FuXing South Road, go up the stairs to the hairdresser and take the elevator to 4F; if you’re early the streetdoor may be closed). Nearest MRT: Technology Building (10 min. walk). Telephone training centre: 02 – 27 00 72 91.
RESERVATION
Please notify us of your intention to join the class, by sending a text-message (SMS) with your name to 09-10 38 27 49.
For those unfamiliar with Voice Yoga, the information about Voice of Dao posted earlier still stands.
Weekly Voice Yoga Returns to Canjune Training Centre
March 15: Underground Trip (performance)
March 29: Lacking Sound Festival (performance)
Voice workshop for spring 2014: coming up soon
This week Voice Yoga returns to Canjune’s Training Centre. Everyone is welcome to try out Voice Yoga on Thursdays between 10 and twelve. No registration necessary, but please be on time. Next week (March 20) the class will shift to the afternoon, between 14 and 16. Read the details about Voice Yoga in this blogpost.
Saturday March 15 you are invited to the performance Underground Trip with Serge Onnen, Erika Sprey (visuals), Tung Chao-Ming and myself (sounds) at Taipei Artist Village. There are two shows, at 19:30 and 21:30, please find the details in my previous blogpost.
Saturday March 29 I am invited to perform at the Lacking Sound Festival, which is one of the more interesting on-going sound events in Taipei. Serge Onnen will join me to provide visuals, and we will explore the theme of mirrors. More details in this post.
Soon I will announce some workshops for this spring season. Come check back here or subscribe to this blog. If you prefer to receive emails write to < info at fusica dot nl> and you will receive updates every once in a while.
