Soma poetic strategies (a voice-dance-writing workshop thinking with the edges of listening)
A workshop by Veza Fernandez, organized by the FWF project “The Performance of Criticism: AI, Bodily Intelligence and Posthumanist Aesthetics” (Led by: Lisa Moravec, Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies), in cooperation with Tanzquartier Wien.
In this workshop Veza Fernandez shares a series of invisible instruments or tools that grow from the body to connect with the limits of what we can almost not hear nor understand. These instruments are conduits, membranes, streams, resonant chambers, which are activated by feeling them grow from different bones and organs from within and between our bodies. These instruments manifest through imagining them while being embodied. They are used to reach far out towards the smoothest, the quietest, the farthest sounds as well as estimations of what those could be. Dance, poem, and song become here an ever-morphing body that mediates between becoming instrument, reaching towards so far unnoticed sonic information and prompt us to imagine how the instrument could actually be played.
In a time where attention is fractured, when technologies stretch and compress perception, producing the illusion of total access while thinning the depth of encounter, these embodied instruments act otherwise. They do not accelerate connection; instead, they complicate it. They insist on opacity, on intermittence. They cultivate an echoethics, a practice of relating through resonance rather than capturing, through attunement rather than extraction. An ethics that acknowledges distance, distortion, and delay. It listens not for clarity alone, but for texture, for interference, for the ways bodies register what cannot be fully shared.
Understanding that we can dance, write, sing, and become in order to listen and to think about listening and its poetics while practicing listening. Not to master the instrument, but to let the instrument undo the certainty of the listener.
Veza Fernández is a dance, voice and performance artist based in Vienna. Her work travels between the poles of poetry and politics of vocal forms of expression as places of affiliation, imagination and transformation. She combines song, writing, dance and speech practices as physical forms of study, experimentation and performance. Her sensitive and intense pieces unfold a polyphonous range of voices and presence, eager to move and be moved. Her background involves philology, education, theatre, music and contemporary dance – fields that influence her artistic research and way of working. Her work has a strong local anchor and is found both in the underground scene and larger dance and theatre institutions. Veza Fernández holds a master’s degree in choreography from DAS Graduate School (Amsterdam Academy for Theatre and Dance). Her pieces have been presented, among others, at brut Wien; Tanzquartier Wien; Sophiensæle Berlin; Gessnerallee in Zurich; de Singel in Antwerp; and La Casa Encendida in Madrid.