Dialogues with a View - Soup for Breakfast

 

In collaboration with Maja Jantar 

In residency at Netwerk Aalst in Oct '19

 

 

Dialogues with a view - soup for breakfast is a performance with live voice and video projection. In this performance Maja Jantar and Ine Claes create a dialogue between their sound and visual worlds. Both artists work with language or text, in their approach they seek a dialogue within their differences and similarities.

 

At the heart of this piece is a video, recorded by Maja Jantar, in the summer of 2011, in Mývatn, Iceland. The video is a single take of 30 minutes, shot through a window facing the landscape of Dimmuborgir, a popular tourist attraction in the north of Iceland. The video shows the landscape and the interactions of the tourists on the spot. The fleetingness of this relationship creates a tension - the landscape forever slowly changing, yet imobile - the tourists on the constant move. The simple repetitive movements of the tourists, by being pulled out of context, create a sense of theatrality. They are the actors in this window view.

 

Maja and Ine look at the dialogue from different perspectives and approach it from different angles by the portraying of the actors on the screen, the use of language and by the organic development of sound communication between the two performers.

By bringing together their texts and vocal materials they create a composition that becomes the orchestration of the video playing behind them.

 

In this work the artists look for the poetry of the silent landscape, the poetry of the simple actions observed on the screen and in the gestures of the two performers on stage. Together they create a performance of sound and image where their two worlds communicate and fuse together.

 

With this work, Maja and Ine want to create dialogues between different worlds and find a common ground. In this way they want to create a metaphor for contemporary society in which communication between different cultures does not always run smoothly. In which we should primarily look for symbiosis and not only focus on where we differ from each other, but on seeking similarities in our differences.