京都の声 / Voices of Kyoto

December 12th, 2021, 6:00 p.m. – Villa Kujoyama -auditorium – Duration: 45-minutes performance followed by a discussion with the audience

Voices of Kyoto is an immersive choral performance that brings together 30 participants from all over Japan.

Amateurs and professionals gathered in the same workplace for 4 days, in order to forge an artistic  performance, after an inventive process combining spontaneous composition, memory, crossed sound heritage and intensive training in expansive listening.

Voice, body and space become poetic instruments to inhabit and color the entirely dark performance space, engaging the audience surrounded by the actors. The circle interior and perimeter were animated by wandering bodies and voices altering perceptions of space and time. A deep sensory experience for both performers and spectators, uniformly vulnerable and absorptive, in this space sinking into darkness… a space of all possibilities.

*This work was recreated on January 23, 2022 and titled 京都の声2 (Voices of Kyoto 2), also at the Villa Kujoyama auditorium, upon a Kyoto Seika University commission (京都精華大学). We included some of their students in the performance. Following the performance, we had a talk around diversity in Japan alongside Yuki Koji, promoter of the Ainu culture and language in Japan and abroad, Oussouby Sacko, director-president of Kyoto Seika University, and Kenichi Abe, professor and president of the Institute for Global Environmental Studies (Japan).