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Oracle

PROJECT

Oracle

Oracle is an improvisation practice where body, voice, identity and participation meet: a public, emancipative and sharable act that involves individuality in a communal setting. The ‘prophecy’ of the Oracle can be read as the voices of individuals that open their interiority in a group, but also as a social-critical awareness, questioning the position of the human being in the social, political and ecological environment.

Rather than focusing on composition or singing from a musical practice Caroline Daish, Justine Maxelon and Michel Yang explore inner sensations coming from a body practice. The invisible becomes concrete not through sight but through sound. By practicing with eyes closed they access another form of self, heighten listening and investigate duality within and between themselves and the spectator. Their voices meet in (dis)harmony, while their physicality embodies the vocality of the other bridging (dis)harmony to the visual. The vocal architecture, blind interaction, and movement score create a space for research and play.

As a permeable practice Oracle is co-created by the participants and the environment. The collective workings as well as each session is unique to the moment and context. Often practicing in public spaces, Oracle offers momentary readings. Until now Caroline Daish, Justine Maxelon and Michel Yang have had practices in train stations, parks, institutions, forests, public libraries, urban gardens, waterways and private living spaces.

The result is a soundscape intuitively self-orchestrated by the collective. The spectator receives the reading as a visual perspective, sonic experience, and spatial-social relation – having thoughts, character and history of its own – revealing the human condition embedded in vocal sounds.

For Oracle’s residency at wpZimmer,

  • Daish, Maxelon and Yang will continue to practice, score and document the Oracle body-voice practice in studio, in non-studio, and in public spaces.
  • They will practice and evaluate ways of collective working recognising that by caring for each one’s boundaries and contributions, they care for the Oracle practice as a whole.
  • They will evaluate their recent and ongoing projects on the level of collective working ways, gathering artistic questions surfaced, treating our documentations (graphic scores, images, videos, automatic writings).

Michel Yang

BE, US
https://michelyang.wordpress.com/
Michel Yang is an American born, Brussels-based performance artist. Michel’s primary medium is the body, however, video and photography have recently begun to enter her work as extensions of her body practice. Presently Yang is following an audio-visual post-graduate with Sound Image Culture. She received a Master of Fine Arts in Dance at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and has followed post-graduate studies with a.pass and Sound Image Culture. As a performer she has worked with Lilia Mestre, Stefan Dreher, Pierre Droulers, Mia Lawrence, and Walter Verdin to name a few. As a teacher Michel’s subjects are contemporary dance, improvisation, and forms of materialization.

Justine Maxelon

BE, DE
Justine Maxelon is a Brussels based dancer and performer, graduated from IWANSON – international school for contemporary dance (Munich) in 2009. Justine has worked as dancer, performer, and/or collaborator for a variety of artists, choreographers, and directors. Some include Daniel Linehan, Benjamin Vandewalle, Julia Bardsley, Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, ... Justine’s dramaturgical coaching include idioter by Alma Söderberg and Hendrik Willekens, nadita by Alma Söderberg.

Caroline Daish

BE, AU
https://carolinedaish.wordpress.com/
Caroline Daish arrived in Brussels in 2000 and has worked as performer, collaborator and advisor in performance, dance, sound pieces and film productions. She is a book for Mette Edvardsen’s living book project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine and performer in What Nature Says and member of the you you you choir by Myriam Van Imschoot. In 2018 she will perform in the production “Safe” by Julia Pfleiderer in collaboration with ICTUS.