A polyrhythm might disturb our listening habits.
Confusion comes and goes - for the listener and the player.
Listening is a state of tension.
Listening to the strange, the change.
Listening across difference.
Listening further than you can see.
To Speak Light Pours Out (Concert Version) invites us to a listening space; a sensory world of percussive rhythms and spoken texts, both political and poetic. Polyrhythmic beats bring physical tensions and pleasures - feeding a selection of writings by different authors that celebrate the powers of transformation, resistance, and new shapes of being. Sounds agitate words and vice versa - a space for listening and thinking, anger and joy.
Based on the 2020 performance To Speak Light Pours Out, the concert version improvises on that material with new input from a changing lineup of performers, texts and musical experiments. Part lecture, part concert, part wild drum solo - each edition of the concert is a new agitation of sounds and words, inviting us to enjoy the sharp energies of positive disturbance and resolute possibility.
Listening to the quiet, into which new things scream into existence.
the old world is over, it’s over, it’s over -
turn and be the strange
everything must change
“McIntosh's works are often highly interactive and immersive performances that physically engage the audience in an elegant and subtle way. Her performances explore and celebrate the co- presence of people and their interdependence and are extremely political in this regard. Their idea of a fundamentally and inescapably interconnected humanity goes hand in hand with an idea of community that defies simplifications and codifications, allows differences, is aware of its margins and does not seek consensus and compromise.
In “To Speak Light Pours Out” the audience is again immersed in the role of the spectator. In a sequence of musical episodes, an acoustic space opens up, in which a kinesthetic experience is created primarily through rhythms. This soundscape as well as sung and spoken texts and the physicality of the performers move between playful and direct, gentle and confrontational.”
- Thomas Frank, artistic director Residenz, Schauspiel Leipzig.
Kate McIntosh is a Brussels-based artist who practices across the boundaries of performance, theatre, video and installation.
Her works often focus on the physicality of both performer and audience, the manipulation of objects and materials, and the development of direct relations with and between audience members. Kate's practice is guided by her ongoing fascinations with the misuse of objects, playfulness with the public, a love of theatrical images and an off-beat humour.