Sound installation result of production residency Angelica Liddell in the Sound LAB
Emily arises out of the fascination of the Spanish writer, stage director and actress Angélica Liddell for the American poet Emily Dickinson, who spent a good part of her life confined to a room in her father’s place in Amherst and whose huge work was not published until many years after her death.
It is, mostly, part of the research that the artist carries out during her production residency at LABoral. For this work, Angélica Liddell takes one of the most often repeated words in the verses of Dickinson, bee, with the purpose of “giving a voice to the chaos that built a poetic voice: The buzz of bees, the chants of Massachusetts native Americans, the noise and the fury of Shakespeare and some poems that Dickinson would read backwards, her own poems”. She says in a letter that this way of reading “When we dive into it from the beginning, it is disruptive. “I have done it (often, very often)”, says Liddell: “Something subdues the mind. Therefore, this inversion will be registered because only through chaos, in this case sound chaos, harmony returns to the world, only through inversion is the mind subdued”.
The huge installation at the Sound LAB of the Art Center includes a big methacrylate box filled with five hundred bumblebees. The buzz of those animals, the projection of the first registered video about American Indians – contemporary to Emily Dickinson – and another audiovisual recording with the essays of Esta breve tragedia de la carne, together with a selection Shakespeare’s texts and the fragment Jesus bleibet meine Freude (Jesus remains my joy) of the Cantata BWV 147 by Johann Sebastian Bach generate a sound and visual narrative that results in Emily.
Together with Emily, Angélica Liddell is preparing at LABoral the production of Esta breve tragedia de la carne, a performance work that will premiere at the 39th La Bâtie-Festival in Geneva, an institution that co-produces both pieces with the Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial.
Direction and staging: Angélica Liddell
Production and logistics assistant: Julio Provencio
Installation: Enrique Marty
Sound: Antonio Navarro with Angélica Liddell
Responsible for production and dissemination: Atra Bilis Teatro/ Iaquinandi, S.L. Mamen Adeva and Gumersindo Puche
Responsible for the programme of the Sound LAB: Daniel Romero
