21 November 2020 18:30 Kanuti Gildi Saal, Kanuti Gildi Saal

Us VIII/VII/IX @ NU Performance Festival 2020: Voice of Synthetic Polyphony

The voice is a hybrid of body and atmosphere, it is time-based, moves through space, it comes from an incredibly precise organ. It is as personal as the tip of a finger and, better than a stone's throw, is able to reach suitably distant people. The voice is an interface between body and outside world. An attempt of the body to expand its materiality, if you will.
The voice activates the material surrounding us, sets particles in vibration to send out what the person speaking or singing wants to communicate. The voice can thus reach other bodies, which in turn can transform the vibration of the material around them into information. If these bodies decide to join in, to sing along or to speak, a choir is formed and with it a sound body, which itself can be understood as an entity. Through the voice as an expanding, connecting element, from a group of people - clearly distinguishable from the eye as independent persons - a body is created, through the consensus of synchronicity. Until a voice begins to solicit.

In Us, Nicolas Buzzi uses findings from the psychology of perception to combine elements into a whole, a world of sound that surrounds the audience. In the reverse, the same parameters (of shape separation) allow individual elements to gradually break out of this whole, to demonstrate their independence. In this way, the work creates an alternating bath between unison and wild polyphony, between isolation and swarm.