In Words, Words, Words no words will be heard. I am looking for sounds and movements that give us a very minimal impression of someone speaking, someone trying to say something. I try to find borders of sounds and movements that are very remotely related to speech and singing. The piece looks for these small moments of phonetic communication, often falling back to moments during which our (body) language is silent again.

In this piece five performers stand side by side. All have a microphone in one hand and a (small, not too heavy and portable) loudspeaker in the other hand. A white cardboard is glued to the speaker. The sounds from the loudspeaker replace the words you would normally produce with your mouth. The mouth is—so to speak—detached from its usual place on the body and can now be held in one’s hand. Only a minimal gesture of speaking remains: the microphone goes to the loudspeaker-mask and back again, and the microphone controls all the sounds coming from the loudspeaker with only this movement. The sounds themselves are as remote as possible from language: they are long and monotonous. Some variation slowly emerges throughout the piece, but most sounds are very remote of what would not normally come through a microphone for speech.