The artistes Bettina Hoffmann (Montreal) and Haruka Hirayama (Tokyo) invite you to an special public presentation inspired by their current work within DAÏMÔN’s residency program.
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During their residency at Daïmôn, Bettina Hoffmann, visual artist with a focus on video and performance from Montreal/originally Berlin and composer Haruka Hirayama from Tokyo, are exploring body movements interacting with sounds. They started their collaboration in early 2018 which culminated in public performances at various venues in Tokyo in 2018 and 2019.
“The residency at Daïmôn provides us an exceptional opportunity to dive into the multifaceted possibilities of sound creation and modulation through physical interaction. We are experimenting with the sounds of everyday actions, instruments, synthesisers and speech in multiple languages. Then different types of motion sensors are applied to bodies so that movements are used as sound controllers to change volume, particles of sounds and their frequency of repetition, pitch, reverb and delay time and more.
The title of our project is inspired by the novel “The Woman in the Dunes” by Abe Kobo (1962), that is depicting a situation of a man trapped in the dunes, fighting the ever-flowing sand, as well as other humans who prevent him to leave. Our project “People in the Dunes” deals with the feeling of being trapped, with conflicts and tensions between people, self and other, exteriority and interiority, seeing and being seen. We aim to express this complexity through performances of body movements and a variety of sounds that influence and change each other reciprocally. The interactive play provokes specific gestures that inform following movements and, at the same time, create a complex piece of music.”
Several musical compositions will be performed by dancers/actors Ashley Bowa, Lucile Godet and Véronique Gaudreau from Gatineau and cellist Ariel Carrabré from Montreal interrelating actions with sounds.
Both creators’ research intersects in this new collaborative project: Haruka Hirayama’s major focus is applying elements of non-musical-instruments to music composition to investigate an alternative method for composing. Bettina Hoffmann’s interest is based on body movements, subtle gestures, distance and proximity, with an interest in ambiguous movements and actions that shift between violence and caring. Noises made by the dancers are amplified to stress their physicality and spatiality. Her interest is to figure out how those sounds could be used to create a sound scape that resembles music.
