Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
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ItemThe Air Between Us(University of Otago, Dunedin, 2021-05-19)From the clear skies of Central Otago to the dense smog of Tehran, LungSong makes connections through our most intimate act, breathing. Using song, dance and live sampling to travel from one place to another, resisting ‘the forgetting of air’ (Irigaray 1999), breath activates shifts between dimensions. Recordings of the atmosphere’s compositional change become an immersive sonic texture, choreography takes place in the spaces between us: in-land and On Air. LungSong is a multi-sited performance event in development by the creative team Carol Brown (choreography), Russell Scoones (sound design) and Kasia Pol (performance design). Living in a world that is in a state of chaos and emergency, facing climate catastrophes and humanitarian crises, this performance research project acknowledges that as artists we do not exist in a vacuum, apart from these realities but are confronted with them daily. Our living relations through inter-disciplinary practices, anticipate a future that cannot be known in advance, but upon whose unfolding, our kinesthetic and sonic tuning towards response-ability depends. LungSong is a performance experiment towards an ethics of breathing. Transcultural, transcontextual and inter-species, it locates air as matter, inspired and exhaled in a world that is shared. Drawing on research into the exchanges of breaths between New Zealand Māori, Iranian and Argentinian dancers and musicians in Aotearoa New Zealand, informed by feminist, queer and indigenous philosophies and cut with samples from atmospheric research science taking place in NIWA @ Lauder, this performative presentation aims to open a dialogue on that most taken for granted element of performance practice, the air between us.