Language
Nine Indian woman are standing together in a small circle.
One of them is pronouncing a text in her local Indian mother tongue.
The other participants who don't speak this language, try to speak along with the speaker in a lower volume and with a delay as short as possible, by concentrating on her sound, intonation and lip-movements.
Then the next participant pronounces the same text in her mother tongue with the other participants trying to speak along with her.
In this way the same text rotates along the circle in the various languages: Tamil, Sindhi, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi and English, accompanied by the buzzing irregular sound of the other voices.
the text, fragments of one of the descriptions of the sound of many voices speaking:
‘.......a harmonious sound is created, filling up the space. Some voices overlap and some are lagging. The lap in each voice gives a new texture to the sound created.
The most audible sound, for once, is my own. Slowly I start concentrating on each one of the voices trying to cope up with their speed and melody’
‘......the many sources of sound, with slight variations in rhythm and tone, oscillate around a common invisible thread. Every source tries to follow this thread, and each of them becomes the thread by turn, like birds flying in formation.
While hearing and following an unknown language, the cluster of sounds gets more disjointed and indistinct, like a drone. The imitating sounds create differences in consonants while trying to fill in the gaps in their hearing’
| year | 2015 |
| location | Srishti school of Art and Design Bangalore India |
| further information | Besides English and the national language Hindi, six national Indian languages are spoken in the group of nine female participants of my workshop ‘Voice: time and space‘ at Srishti school of Art and Design in Bangalore: Tamil, Sindhi, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati.
The workshop addresses aspects of time and space in voice and language, experienced through exercises in listening and describing the sounds of speech.
For the concluding performance Language we choose two paragraphs from those descriptions which were then translated in the seven Indian languages as mentioned above.
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| project or event | Srishti Interim |