TSANFLEURON | Hearing the Body, Seeing the Voice, 2010

"Tsanfleuron – Hearing the Body, Seeing the Voice", the New Opera Project, is a voice performance combining a concert / live performance and virtual image space.
Franziska Baumann and Claudia Brieske lead the audience onto an audio - visual playing field and, on several levels, to a completely new way of experiencing the transfer from seeing to hearing.

By experimenting with her voice and the use of an electronic interactive instrument, a sensor glove which she has developed, Franziska Baumann, a vocalist, creates unexpected emotions. She has integrated the sounds from the “Megalopolis” Cairo and the “utopia of the empty space”, the high plains of the “Tsanfleuron” glacier into her singing. Angela Bürger is in charge of the material’s dramaturgical.
Media artist, Claudia Brieske, creates new image spaces by processing fragmentary video sequences recorded in Cairo and Tsanfleuron which when, projected onto the stage, will develop into rhythmical image patterns.
In order to capture both places and their atmosphere and cultur, these sequences will be transformed into “picture modules”. The way people deal with physical closeness as well as the urban structure of a densely populated space will be looked into. In addition, there will be visual impulses which will be relocated from the high plains to an urban space. There they will be transformed and will reappear at the other location as a sound reference (for example, the singer is on the glacier with a traffic cone and cars crossing a busy junction in Cairo while she is singing).

The image patterns will be projected onto several screens on the stage and will provide a setting for Franziska Baumann which she can control by gestural electronics. These images create a “spatial libretto” which advances and influences the dynamics of the sound (“sound icon” or “PICTOretto“). They are the counterpart to the vocal elements, so called auditive scores, which have been developed by Franziska Baumann.
Nature and technology, silence and urban Moloch, solitude and dissolution of boundaries in the urban flow, concentration of sound and noisy density, mono- and polyphony, seeing and hearing – the voice production “Tsanfleuron” takes place between two opposing fields, that of virtual and that of real space. In a setting of poetic voice space and moving images, a voice opus emerges which integrates the unfamiliar and goes beyond limits.

Many thanks to:
Egyptian composer, Dr. Nahala Mattar who allowed the artists to gain special access to the local music culture and its approach to music.
Faculty of Music Education (FME) of the Helwan University of Cairo and the singers Hoda Nossier, Amira Reda, Amir Hedayah, Bela Elshik.

The production and the premier of TSANFLEURON supported by:
Dampfzentrale Berne, WIM Berne, KulturStadtBern(City of Berne), Community of Köniz, Erziehungsdirektion des Kanton Berne, Burgergemeinde Beren, Fondation Nestlé pour l’Art, Schweizerischer Tonkünstlerverein (Swiss Music Association), ifa Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V. (institute for external affaires, Germany)