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Resonant bodies
Voice and movement get married in Stridulate.
Rachel Damon and Dan Mohr are about to blow the old song-and-dance routine out of the water. The artists have created a fascinating evening-length, abstract composition for a small ensemble of performers who move and sing simultaneously.
Although, if you attend their debut performance this weekend, you won’t hear any lyrics. In order to marry body movement and voice, Damon and Mohr looked to instances in the natural world where body movement and sound exist together. “We researched animals and insects that make noise,” says Mohr, who brings his chops as a vocalist and composer to the collaboration. Ultimately, they named their project Stridulate, a term for the action of rubbing body parts together to make sound, as crickets do with their wings.
In a recent rehearsal, the five members of the group (Damon and Mohr, plus Jeff Harms, Lily Emerson and Erica Mott) morphed through various scenarios and arrangements: At one point, the group created a line in which every other member was doing the same sound-movement sequence, resulting in a mathy geometry; another sequence pitted Mohr as a stationary vocal soloist while the others formed an organic, moving-sounding backup group; a third scene involved the whole group in a seated circle around a harmonium and toning in a soothing, almost meditative chant.
At one point in their process, the artists considered layering recorded sound into the work, but they realized it would alter the balance they wanted to create between music and dance. “We determined to do everything live,” says Damon, who is a dancer, choreographer and lighting designer. Mohr says that in working with dance, “I want to create a context where music is treated fairly. A lot of times dancers pick music for their dance, unbeknownst to the creator of the music, and I find that to be dishonest, unnatural and lazy.”
The project got its start when Damon approached Mohr after his solo performance of original work, Guns, Aloe, at Links Hall in September ’07. “I was interested in how I might draw my own voice out. I wanted to access a deeper layer of my body,” she says. Damon also hoped to convey these tools to other dancers, so she asked Mohr to coach members of her group, the Synapse Arts Collective.
When Mohr understood what Damon was after, he suggested they apply for a Crosscut, a local grant given by the Experimental Sound Studio and Links Hall that supports collaborations between dance and music artists who have never worked together before: “The deadline was in a couple of months, and it was a no-brainer,” he says.
The two have made the most of the jump start provided by the Crosscut funds. fNow close to completing their first major work, they are planning to tour Stridulate in the U.S. and Europe. The ensemble has been invited to perform in July 2010 at the Roy Hart International Arts Center in France. And they are working on building tools for teaching their discoveries to other artists through workshops and classes. “When we applied for the Crosscut grant, little did we know we’d be married for the next three years,” jokes Damon.
Although singing and dancing together are an age-old human occupation, Damon, Mohr and their ensemble explore the territory with fresh perspective. “A vocabulary has developed [from our work],” Mohr says. “It’s new and raw. We’re discovering a way to train our expressiveness.”
Synapse Arts Collective presents Stridulate Friday 12 and Saturday 13 at Galaxie in Logan Square.
