Utopia – [just around the corner?]
A drift for dancers and silent walkers with Geert Vermeire. A silent walk in series of walks since 2016, during Sound Walk Sunday 2019 – at LISTEN, A Season of Sound Art, Frome – September 1st, 2019.
Dancers move around – in silence- through the city, with no other intention then to get lost, with a book, inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia, but containing in this version only one word and in a format that challenges the very idea of a book.
It is a book that resembles a walk – a movement, it is not linear, it opens from different angles, it has pages folded in pages, you can open and browse through it in different directions, actually it is not a book to be read, it is a book to be shared spontaneously between the silent dancers/walkers, carried around and to be opened on places that come towards the performers/walkers, symbolically opening the places, inviting to read the place, the walker and the moment in which they stand. The public is invited to join in with the dancers.
A silent walking and movement performance directed by Geert Vermeire, conceived on the “Utopia” book by Stefaan van Biesen, together forming an artistic walking duo since 2001 developing in a collaborative practice called the Milena principle.
As a duo of walkers, they invite guest artists and the public to perform with them in a continuous series of walking performances in contemporary cities around the world. Interview video.
Utopia is a performative silent walk, adapted to each place and shaped by the participating dancers/walkers, and organized since 2016 in Braga (Portugal), Brasilia, New York, Queens, Brussels, Ypres, Athens and Nicosia.
The walk goes along with an Utopia soundscape, called ‘Hythlodaeus 2015’ composed out of the poem ‘Unfolding the City’ by Geert Vermeire and ‘Siren’ by Stefaan van Biesen. Voice and composition by Stefaan van Biesen. Field recordings by Geert Vermeire and Stefaan van Biesen. The name of the sound piece is inspired by the explorer of Utopia, originated during field recordings of walks of the artists in Venice and in Antwerp where Thomas More wrote his book. This digital material was composed to a soundscape for the Utopia sound project for Cities and Memory.
Video excerpt Utopia Athens.
A co-production of Sound Walk Sunday 2019 – LISTEN, A Season of Sound Art, Frome – 2019
LISTEN, A Season of Sound Art, hosted by Black Swan Arts in Frome and curated by Helen Ottaway
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Libraries as Gardens – sound walk in Athens
The National Garden of Athens is transformed into an audio book of stories by people all over the world, during the pandemic, telling about their favorite public gardens and reading from their favorite books at home during lockdown. You can listen to the recordings while walking inside the National Garden of Athens through a webapp