ULTIMA 2024
The voice has a unique ability to flow through seemingly irreconcilable spheres, elements and positions. Eavesdropper is a trembling choreographic work which intensifies the indeterminacy of the voice by using bodily movement to distort vocal sound. Rhythm, tonality, timbre and spatiality gliding between the irresistible and disturbing evokes a productive uncertainty; social and bodily mechanisms are put into motion, revealing how assumptions about the unstable and impure serve to maintain the social order in certain cultures.
What else is there to discover by moving towards the place where meaning collapses, and in the end losing oneself for a brief moment? In pursuit of other modes of perception and alternative connections between bodies and surroundings, the acoustic voicebody shifts from the desire to expand to a radical openness. The inside spills out, and the outside seeps in. Sound dances through space while movement rings in the ears. An ephemeral architecture is whirled up in the dark, lending support to any attempt at renegotiating the relation between difference and commonality.
Tormod Tora Skår Midtbø is an Oslo-based dance artist from a small coastal village in Fjaler, Norway. With an autodidactic approach to voice work, they explore different tensions between the voice, the body and space through various choreographic formats. Drawing inspiration from a range of extended vocal practices, sound theory, trans studies and ballroom culture, they fuse and confuse what is heard and what is seen, putting sound and image into a dynamic interplay.
In collaboration with Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival .