Jule Flierl

My choreographic work focuses around the question, if the voice is a part of the dancing body, or if the dance genre must remain silent. While Yvonne Rainer stated that the voice is a body part just like her limbs; Isadora Duncan danced silently with her inner voice; and it was a scandal when Valeska Gert unhinged her voice while dancing. Gert later conceptualized the term »TonTanz«, tone-dance, which I revive and continue to develop in my own work.

I am fascinated how conceptions of the body change over time and that the voice as a technology of the self always finds new relations to the body. I ask myself how the baroque Bel-Canto voice would inhabit the gestures of romantic ballet (Operation Orpheus 2016), how the anti propaganda of Valeska Gert's dancing tones in the Weimar Republic would have sounded (Störlaut 2018), how to choreograph the separation of body image and vocal sound of Katalin Ladik's avant-garde performances in Yugoslavia (U.F.O., Duet with Irena Z. Tomažin 2021) and how the concert of the future gives memory to the organic body that can still be found in old partitions (Die Hörposaune, Duet with Antonia Baehr 2022).

I am deeply influenced by voice philosophy such as »A voice and nothing more« by Mladen Dolar, »The gender of sound« by Anne Carson or »The race of sound« by Nina Sun Eidsheim. Interlinking philosophical questions around voice and identity, but also cultural practices of voicing towards the production of bodies is guiding the decision making in my work. From 2017-2020 I co-curated the series »From Breath to Matter«, which staged contemporary voice performance from all art fields. For 2021 I co-hosted and -organized an online edition called »The Aerosol Lab« and a Podcast with interviews of selected voice artists.