Threnos (for the Throat)

for vocal soloists and sound processing

 ... Ashamed and ashamed for being ashamed we look away and ask for you to do the same—

The transition from animal to meat is one that intentionally mutes the life and death of its subject. Unlike humans, these animals generally die in concealment, and the dead are not mourned. In Threnos, what is so often hidden behind the scenes is brought onto the stage in a para-liturgical rite, a performance that offers space for reckoning and reflection. Throughout, the throat acts as a kind of locus—a metaphorical and literal site of language, ingestion, song, slaughter, swallowing, and vulnerability, connecting the mourners and the mourned in their shared physicality. 

Fortuna Won't Be Fauvel's Match!

Sheep, what are we waiting for? There's a wolf in the flock!

Fortuna Won’t Be Fauvel’s Match! is based on a gothic allegorical verse romance in which the central metaphor for moral decay and decadence is an ambitious horse/ass. The main character – Fauvel – is an incarnation of sin, irrationality, unreliability, dominance, flattery. Fortuna Won’t Be Fauvel’s Match! mocks human egotism, hedonism, hypocrisy and excesses of the governing classes, of secular as well as church rule, a society contaminated by sin and corruption. The ruling class is despotic and greedy, forgetting about the natural equality of people. Man through politics/the church is a symbol of everything that is wrong with our society and the system which administers it. This issue fascinates since it judges exploitations in the human society and poses the question if today, after 700 years, it is any easier to talk, or do we still whisper.

Black Snow

“where we build our futures”

From 1946 to 1958, the United States conducted 67 tests in the Marshall Islands. Black Snow is a tale based on the archival footage of these tests and their on-going threats imposed on the lives of the people and the environment of the islands. The native people living further from the Bikini Atoll (the site of the first atomic tests-Operation Crossroads) were not aware of the effect of the radiation at the time of the bombing. They were not informed properly. Some of the people mistook the nuclear fallouts as snow and ate them. The US government advised the people of the islands not to consume the local goods contaminated with radiation, such as coconuts, which were part of their staple diet. Instead, the US government provided processed food, which increased the rate of diabetes, obesity and other health issues on the islands.  

Toxic psalms

Ultimate collective experience

Toxic Psalms is an open-ended collection of scenes – a juxtaposition of music and texts from medieval to the present time with fascinating sounds of extended vocal techniques. Scenes move between different spiritual worlds of the past and the present. The setting is an imaginary world moving among the shadows of our ancestors, and a reflection of modernity at the same time. The essence of Toxic Psalms is the idea of the collective that is embodied in the ensemble. Toxic Psalms reflect the unspoken violence. Man’s existence is transformed into a worldly drama: men killing for the glory of their psalms.

Placebo or Is There One Who Would Not Weep

Eia mater, fons amoris! – Hail, mother, source of love!

Placebo is a point of departure: Virgin Mary – the most significant religious image of the western world who officially never gains the status of a Catholic goddess. Mother Mary – as a social construct, not as objective, historical reality, as an instrument of supervision and control. Christianity – a symbolic construct in which femininity is confined within the limits of the Maternal. The Lady and the Virgin as an absolute authority. Mother Mary – an object of imaginary love, as a substitute for suppressed male libido. Paradox: Virgin, yet mother. Question: to fall or not to fall. Mary who defies death. 

When the mountain changed its clothing

Who will live after them? Their children.

When the Mountain Changed its Clothing draws its inspiration from the Resian folk song Da Pa Ćanynu, reflecting the seasonal changes on the mountain of Kanin, Slovenia. According to Goebbels, the intense activity on the stage derives from the exceptional energy of the young protagonists, and reflects social transformations of political, social and cultural changes of the performer's domestic region.

Was haben Sie gegen Bauern, Gnädige Frau?

There's no smoke between me and the sky

"What have you got against peasants, lady?" he had asked, before he obeyed her request.

Memories are the main protagonists, and voices from the past are the ones that lead us to unexpected effects where Time takes initiative for action.Characters – the peasant and women − speak from within their historical contexts into the present in an effect which creates a museum-like theatre of the dead. 

Rusalki

Songs of dark laughter

Restless souls of Rusalki, miraculous female characters as symbols of potent, not yet realised female creativity; weavers of natural cycles and erotic primordial bonds between man and nature are the main protagonists of this non-narrative music theatre. "Songs of dark laughter" in archetypal adventure, in a ritual beyond the limits of reason are metaphysics of the good and the evil. Scenery inspiration comes from the ancient Greek treasury, songs "from soil and water", "screams, cries, laughter and songs" are based on traditional Slavic melodies and modern compositions. 

From time immemorial

Music about time

The musical world of the project follows the archaic seclusion beyond space and time. It is an open-ended work, set in an imaginary musical setting. It is not an ode to the past nor directed toward the idyllic. It moves among the shadows of our ancestors who are related to us in every aspect – in joy and sadness, in self-confidence and despair.

CS Light

We have a need of a soothing story.

Tones are condensed, coloured and given a chance to float. We listen to where the sound will turn, how much time it will need to fall and where the turning point before the new ascent will be. It cannot be done without an empathy strained will. This will holds attention and anticipates the consequences that the sound itself does not have. A tone looks for soulmates, builds a community that needs to be heard and felt.  
Elegance and magic, reaching with their repetitiveness for the threshold of the etheric. 

Vampirabile

Myths, legends, spells and incantations in mysterious images

Lives of myths are rich, mysterious, never fully developed. Mythological world that comes to life in this project is exuberant and mysterious, never fully explored. It lures with its intertwinement of imagination and reality, nature and man, beliefs and experience, hopes and fears, power and powerlessness … A nation recognizes itself in its own mythology which distinguishes it from other nations, and yet through it they seem so similar. This world is so distant, and yet so near.

Perspective East

Chants from different religions and traditions from Orient

Perspective East combines a very wide range of musical expression. Asia features different kinds of culture, which consequently leads to a diverse understanding of the role of music.  Perspective East can be sounds of cosmic spheres, the natural expression of consciousness, ritual songs and music, which cure the body, calm the spirit and carry the sacred to ordinary people's lives. 

Who’d have thought that snow falls

Innocences

Performative installation with voices is based on theme  "Like a Virgin" and sets out the implications of the word "like" and the identity issue with the regard to two of the title’s reference points - Madonna and Morton Feldman. What does identity mean today and how is it established and manipulated through contemporary means and cultural tendencies? Drawing on the idea that many identities within one personality exist simultaneously, work shows that they are connected, yet one cannot always see the connections between those multiple identities of any given individual.

Vertical thoughts

Parallel realities

Distinguishing between live and dead sounds.
Distinguishing between live and dead time is blurred.
Undulation of time and its infinite repetitions.

Spixody/Stripsody 3

It’s true, a shout is loud.

Spixody explores music and sound poetry of the 20th and the 21st century. With the selection and performance of music and sound poetry Spixody is a project that reflects re-integration of word, music and partially movement, as it is understood in the concept of Greek mousiké. The structure of the performance is influenced by popular entertainment genres, especially by theatre of sequences, episodes and varieté.  

Stripsody

New sounds, new forms of expressions

1. Intake of air
2. Sound is created in the larynx
3. Sound resonators receive the tone and influence it
4. Articulators shape the sound into recognisable units

That is actually everything that happens when singing, but the results of various subtle variants in the number three and four offer a universe full of different sounds: whistling, laughter, screaming, slurping, cackling, howling, roaring, weeping, barking, chirping, grunting, wailing, hooting, hissing, speaking, whispering and screaming. 

Scivias

Chants unify

For thousands of years humans have recognized the remarkable power and ability of sound, voice, and music to bring joy into our lives, to give meaning to life's rituals and passages, and to connect us with a divine presence greater than ourselves. The ancient art of chanting has long been embraced by the world's great religious traditions as a path to healing and enlightenment.

Slovenian sounds

The heritage of Slovenian vocal art

Basic element of project Slovenian Sounds is full comprehension of Slovenian music and, in a broader sense, Slovenian spiritual heritage; the choir applies this awareness to modern creative forms of expression. With interpreting synthesis of folk songs, dance and music, the choir manages to avoid the usual trap of pursuing nostalgia, or transforming into a 'living museum'. Folk heritage for Carmina Slovenica forms a model for today's creativity and creations, which comprise characteristics, features, particularities and differences – ingredients that are essential for creating modern life enriched with the dimensions of Slovene national heritage.

Ursonate

The word in the sphere of pure sonority

In The Ursonate the word passes over into the sphere of pure sonority. The word reveals its inner alchemy and has its place, space, weight and colour. With the non-semantic sound poetry, escaping from the field of words and passing into the field of music, the words are transferred to another performative level. Sound poetry in its creative vocal execution comes to life as a piece of music.

Women´s delights

Costumes landscape

Restless spirits, women with long hair, miraculous, peculiar and eccentric female characters without comparison. And singing which awakens passionate longing that cannot be resisted. Neither can one resist the component that attaches the culture of the eye to the radiation of the music. Nor the feeling that a costume landscape inspired by music incites. A costumed body is exposed by giving messages, and it can at the same time be a message itself. Within the project Women’s Delights the real dialogue begins – a dialogue between Karmina’s sound and Belinda’s costume space.