Commission Counterflows 2021

Sounds 4 Survival Audio Book – We Make A Way To Invent The Rhythm Through Versions Of Our Shared Name

SERAFINE1369 & Young Nettle

Sounds 4 Survival: We Make A Way To Invent The Rhythm Through Versions Of Our Shared Name is an audiobook narrated almost entirely by Young Nettle and SERAFINE1369, the voices of the many authors are indistinct as we go back into multiple contradictory memories of shared experiences and fragmented reflections from the touring performance Sounds 4 Survival (2018/19).

How to use: Click on the images to activate a Chapter of the audiobook. Alternatively skip to a track listing to listen to the audio without the need for a visual cue.

Introduction: Sounds 4 Survival: We Make A Way To Invent The Rhythm Through Versions Of Our Shared Name
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[Sounds 4 Survival, Café Oto, London 2019. Rebecca Bellantoni, Phoebe Collings-James, Chloe Filani, Onyeka Igwe, Jamila Johnson-Small. Image by Dimitri Djuric]
Prologue: POWER
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[Sounds 4 Survival, Wysing Polyphonic, 2018. Yasmine Akim, Phoebe Collings-James, Onyeka Igwe, Jamila Johnson-Small, Katarzyna Perlak. Image by Wilf Speller.]
Epilogue: Can I come round your house? No. I’m Out. No I’m busy. Leave a message. By B. Covington Sam-Sumana
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[Jamila Johnson-Small in Sounds 4 Survival, Bergen, 2019. Image credit Borealis festival]
Dedication: Black Woman
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[Sophia Monique Brown, Bergen, 2019. Image by Yasmine Akim, 2019]
Chapter I: On Performance
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[Image by Sophia Monique Brown]
Chapter III: Lists
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[Image by Rebecca Bellantoni]
Chapter II: This distance is painful at the end of the day I am dying but I forgive you for putting yourself first
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[Phoebe Collings-James in Sounds 4 Survival, Bergen, 2019. Image credit Borealis festival]

Sounds 4 Survival (2018/19) was a live work that grew from a conceptual deconstruction of ‘percussion’ as it functions instrumentally and also as a radical proposition to the various ways you could think about the power of ‘striking an object’, our bodies navigate the sensory labour of their being ‘played’. Charting psycho-emotional landscapes and mapping them on to the physical we work with our multi-dimensional bodies as the primary technology and source material, utilising dance practices to allow emotion to surface and to stimulate language around this and working with proximity, consent and the importance of our individual positioning we invited the group to orient towards our themes.

Created with a changing cast of participants, the work sits somewhere between community gathering and performance, a work embodied through a symbiotic relationship between dance, music and sculpture/objects, asking what an anti-assimilationist practice might look and sound like. The live performance and the creation of a working space for meeting, experimenting and sharing between a group of new people and a space for each person to have some space and time to get to know our/themselves better through focused embodied practice, conversation, improvisation, writing and sounding exercises, and to push beyond each of our own personal boundaries.

Two years on from beginning this work together, we are trying to manifest more questions than answers in our practicing. We are not interested in Identity. We want to put some words to messy, complicated feelings that emerge in states of oppression, hybridity and constant bias. We want to harness this language for our own ends and mobilise it as/through performative action.

The text is a chorus of some kind, holding multiple positions and articulations from the group of Black women and femmes who participated in the process of creating the performance. The sonic-landscape is a variation on the performance sound-score featuring audio samples from our lives, the rehearsal room and pre-recorded music that shifts location and time to hold movement of bodies, thoughts and conversations, as we continue to think about how to create and frame a space that invites and holds difficult and exposing conversation. A space where we confront ourselves, together.

Special thanks to Alexandrina Hemsley and Donna Lynas.



Tracklist

Introduction: Sounds 4 Survival: We Make A Way To Invent The Rhythm Through Versions Of Our Shared Name
Prologue: POWER
Epilogue: Can I come round your house? No. I’m Out. No I’m busy. Leave a message. By B. Covington Sam-Sumana
Dedication: Black Woman
Chapter I: On Performance
Chapter III: Lists
Chapter II: This distance is painful at the end of the day I am dying but I forgive you for putting yourself first