“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, July 7, 2011

Ami Yoshida



I'm beginning to decompress from my London trip. What a lot of strange things I've seen in the last few weeks. One that David Reid showed stands out: Ami Yoshida, whose work is butoh-like in its intensity.

Yoshida doesn't sing, but vocalizes using minimal sounds coming from her lungs through her throat. Very intense. Somehow in the movie David showed, the evoked the sound of an entire forest, through her mouth, with the help of a saxophonist doing extended technique (hitting the keys and breathing through the mouthpiece), and a single piano note disrupted it all. The embedded video isn't it, but it's quite stunning.

Yoshida exemplifies what I call the lingual voice (see David, I got there in the end).

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