Rispondi Monograph

What inspired this?

It was born of a week of exploration on the Infuse residency at Babel Theatre in Chisenhale dance space and everything I had brewing inside me, up until and during that time.

Why the voice work?​

I am sound sensitive. I hear things that are said, some of them I am not supposed to hear…most of them, I lock away like a tape recorder- I can reproduce them with eerie accuracy; it’s called 'enhanced audio graphic memory'.

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There are different accents and languages in your work why is that?​

I am multilingual and those around me often are too. I’ve worked with language (some of it entirely made up by artists like Nicoline Van Harskamp) my whole life, so it’s made its way into my work repeatedly.

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There is a sense of threat in this work... is that accurate?​

Yes I think so. The music helped with that. I think the story we ended up telling was that the process of being an artist 'in flux' is exposing and some of the things you experience are not welcome. You have to accept that you will loose control but there is a fine line between loss of control and loss of power and playfulness.

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Is the choreography… what genre is it?​

It’s in-between genres, it blends elements of dance theatre, contemporary and Sabar*.

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Why Sabar ?

​There were a couple of phrases I learnt a few years ago that stuck with me as both joyful and exhausting. Those parallels fit perfectly with the process of creation and the struggle to simultaneously take the leap and land on your feet whilst keeping a smile on your face… it’s a mad scramble if you don’t know the vocabulary and you can’t hear the drummers' call. You really have to focus on precision. Then when I reversed the shot, it kind of all made sense to me as a story. 

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What do the flowers and the dress represent?

​Ancestry… the longing to walk with people past and to embody the beauty of radiance and lightness. Not forgetting who you are.

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"People Past"... anyone in particular?

A few at this point.

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The two styles of shots seem quite far apart was that deliberate?​

Yes and no. I just knew I wanted certain shots of things in there. Knew I wanted close ups and hand held and fixed…so I had to make it work lol !

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Do you consider yourself a visual artist?

I'm getting there, yes. I very clearly had the digital and exposition space in mind when creating this work. I knew I wanted to change  genres as an artist and that deep down, I probably knew how to do that but needed time to figure it out.

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I’ve done it all now as a performer, site responsive, site specific, theatre, tv, voice over, singing, choreography… then you add the BTS skills; production, videography, design that come with that body of work. So I think this is the only format where I was going to be able to use those things as I please to make meaning of it all.

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Why is it called Rispondi ?

​Because it’s an answer to the call to adventure and a response to being sound sensitive in the gold fish bowl of artistic process.

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*Coming from Wolof and Lebou ethnic groups, sabar was originally a dance organised by women’s associations at the occasion of meetings, baptisms, or weddings, and also during night dance ceremonies called tannëbers. Sabar was seen as a “women’s affair” (Seye 37) and sabar events were “dominated by girls and women” (Neveu Kringelbach 79), even if men used to participate in these dance events, as drummers, young boys, audience or professional dancers. 1

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1. Alice Aterianus-Owanga, Dancing an Open Africanity: Playing with “Tradition” and Identity in the Spreading of Sabar in Europe, Open Cultural Studies, De Gruyter, 2019.