"They say when we’re all in the same space listening together, our heartbeats might end up synchronizing. But our breathing will not, our breathing will stay polyrhythmic.
They say listening might be the most complex of all human behaviours.
To listen is a state of tension.
Listening across difference.
Listening further than you can see."*
Mixing the work of different writers, composers and performers, To Speak Light Pours Out is a performance that immerses the audience in a powerful listening space; creating a sonic world that channels the energy of rhythms, voices, texts, and their meanings.
With the physical pleasure and disorientation of polyrhythmic beats and the raw energy of voices that layer up sonic and spoken images, the tensions are both political and poetic, liberating and activating.
To Speak Light Pours Out is an invitation to enjoy the sharp energies of positive disturbance and resolute possibility, a shout-out to the lust for transformation, resistance, and new shapes of being.
"...like everyone, everywhere, was getting what they wanted."**
"She pushes her fingers into the mud and listens as hard as she can,
until sometimes the mud makes its way up her throat and out of her mouth.
The words are wet and rich and full of power. Words that makes worlds.
To name, to change, to strange."***
*performance quote: Kate McIntosh
**performance quote: Rebecca Tamás
***performance quote: Rebecca Tamás, Kate McIntosh
Read more about the texts in the performance here
What audiences and critics say:
"...taking the audience into the borderland of a forest rave, a club, a literary salon and a dream."
- Peeter Kormašov, Eesti Päevaleht, 28.08.21
“The strength of the performance is that all the elements are constantly in service of ideas about the richness of new and different perspectives. The players draw on nine different texts, written by or inspired by interesting feminist thinkers, playwrights and poets. Meanwhile, they accompany the text with conventional and unconventional forms of percussion and singing: from drum solos to the dragging of drums across the floor, from an a capella duet to a long-drawn-out primal scream. The pleasure that the performers create in their collective creative urge is contagious, and invites the audience to detach themselves from the 'old world' and embrace the unlimited possibilities of 'new worlds'.”
- Marijn Lems, Theaterkrant, 29.10.21
"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.
Full length performance video:
& video interviews (courtesy of Radialsystem, and PACT Zollverein):
