We would like to warmly invite our audience to another (after “Steak House”, which was presented in the Old Brewery in 2005) meeting with the Swiss choreographer – Gilles Jobin.
Just a month after the world premiere, the Old Brewery’s audience will have the opportunity to see Gilles Jobine’s latest production. This time, the artist turns his attention to words, for, the words become the cementing element of the spektacle’s structure – a kind of a golden thread present throughout the performance. The texts and the voices heard from the stage are manipulated in an unconventional manner (via an artificial speech production with the help of voice synthesizing softwear).
The TTS (text to speech) program, converts the written to the spoken. Some of the software’s configurations allow to transform phonetic transcription into vocal form, or mix and link arbitrary word fragments and phonemes in a random order, as well as generate a voice model which bears its own characteristics. The very operation of the transmission manipulation becomes an audio-interaction in its own right. Intonation, accent, sentence type, or an informative statement form a connection between the dancers and the choreographer.
Hazardous Speech: Text to Speech is Gilles Jobin’s attempt to decontextualize the most concrete and permanent elements of his movement language and, further, thoroughly analyze them assuming different angles. What remains, is the contemplation of violence – physical, as well as political.
The reflection over the phenomenon of violence is present in the spectacle’s every particle. The body-screen, media language-physical effort relations are a chance to explore new spaces, in which dancers and the movement are a part of a bigger organizm.
The first game could be described as post-situational. It is the triggering element, at the same time being the mechanism setting the whole event into motion. Voices, languages, historical and topical texts downloaded from the Internet are manipulated to a point in which they constitute a monolithic, poetic environment.
A filled with humor, ambiguous sway affects our perceptive aptitude. This is a precess much resembling the image-body relation, which has already been developed in Jobin’s earlier works (e.g. Braindance, 1999). Waves, frequencies, loops, samples, mixes and interactions are subjected to that particular, fueled by manipulation and impact approach. All this constitutes a kind of materialized hearing in its own right, which unfolds itself and is manifested via diverse means during the spectacle.