vis á vis

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How are we feeling tonight?

With a movement of your hand, you speed up my heartbeat. It gives direction to the music that surrounds us. Your breathing rate makes the room vibrate. Our shared sound changes the encounter. How do moments of encounter take shape when we experience them not primarily by seeing, but by hearing? What happens when we can perceive the sensations of our counterpart acoustically? How do we deal with being exposed to other people in this way? In the confrontation with our own physicality, movement and sound open up new ways of breaking down boundaries and shaking up the restrictions of a visually dominated society.

In 2018, Vis á Vis had a tryout at the Klangstärke Festival Hildesheim. An experiment in a four-hour durational performance.

By definition, the smallest unit of society arises where two subjects meet (physically), perceive each other as embodied subjects (bodily) and explicitly relate their actions to each other. Two subjects can form the basis of society, the archetype of social interaction. They (re)produce social order and society on a macro level. Perspectives on the body as a social construct and as a social constructor go beyond the interrelationship between body and reality, make structural contradictions recognizable and express themselves in individual ambivalences of a body as a social phenomenon.

Two performers sit opposite each other at a table. They look at each other, they do not touch. They look each other in the eye. Vis / á / Vis tells the story(s) between two people, reduced to two bodies that meet.

When everything is gone, what remains? Constructs made of contact microphones and stethoscopes lie on the performers’ bodies. Heart, pulse, lips, larynx. The body sounds merge into an abstract sound composition and make the most fragile emotions audible. What does it sound like when two people look into each other’s eyes? And what happens when both can hear the reactions of the other? Two people, without movement, in a shared feedback loop in which they are nevertheless trapped in their own physicality.